Good, so now we can get along again.

Psht, we're civilized people here. We always get along, just with varying degrees of violence .

*shoots Sniper in the face*

Your opinion is wrong, Sir!

But you're a pansy european who doesn't believe in guns, so too bad for you.
I mean that in the best way possible and have the utmost respect for you and your thoughts.

Do I get to throw a stone?

Isa, put on your viking helmet!

Decided to post something hilarious.

JesusNation^TM, sponsored by Pat Robertson and the National Committee for Republicans.¹

Hilarious? That Steve Strang fellow and Cindy Jacobs lady seem a bit odd, but the rest of that was fairly straight-forward. What was so funny? Or are you just on again laughing at people who have different beliefs than you? You do realize that doing so only makes them dislike you, not change their minds?

Soooo... I hear romney beat da crap out of mr oh bama.

No, he won slightly. I really hope you don't want Romney to win, but if you are then you'll be disappointed because it looks like it'll be a crushing victory for Obama.

Can we not start another three page debate about whether the results will be close or not? I'm definitely for Obama, but I agree that he completely got pwned. Neither of them were particularly exciting, but Romney just did better without a doubt. Sure, I may not agree or believe most of the stuff he said, but a helluva lot more people are talking about what Romney said rather than what Obama said. His stuff was just more memorable. No shame in admitting that. And it's okay for people to support Romney, Flashmarsh. He wouldn't of gotten this far if somethings about him weren't relatively bearable.

That really isn't true. He could very, very easily have gotten this far even if he was a lunatic - I mean, come on, BUSH became US President. The fact is, the debates don't matter. US politics very much encourages people to treat the Democrats and the Republicans as two rival sports teams, with party membership and the like. This means that the majority already know who they will vote for, and it is probably only around 15% who have not made up their minds before the election. The problem with Romney is that he doesn't appeal enough to the independents - Instead he tries to appeal to the right-wing nutjobs, forgetting they'll probably be voting for him anyway.

I don't really understand what, economically, Obama has done so wrong. I'd personally like someone to answer clearly with a problem with hi policies, not just general waffle.

As far as him being bearable, yes, he very much is, but he lost the election after the Republican National Convention. I would have no shame in admitting he said something good, and if you read I did say he won comfortably, though Shos is simply wrong when he says that Obama got slaughtered.

He said he was going to"fix" the economy. Fix has varying degrees. Economy does also (unemployment, outsourcing, debt, etc.). Some think he "fixed" the economy, others don't. It's as simple as that. I don't really think a thing like the economy can be "fixed", hence the quotes.

@Flash
I think much of this has been said before, but here goes anyways:

1. The Budget (that still doesn't exist). Because of our constitution, all budgets and money related bills must originate in the House of Representatives (which is currently controlled by the Republicans). The House has passed many different budgets, all of which have been blocked in the Senate (which is currently controlled by the Democrats). As the president and leader of the Democratic party, this is Obama's fault.

2. The Deficit. Obama promised to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term. Then deficit has doubled (if by deficit you mean the yearly deficit, otherwise our total deficit has increased by %50). The specific policies that Obama's administration have passed that have affected this include, but are not limited to: a bad healthcare system "overhaul", increased war spending in Afghanistan from 20 billion per year to around 100 billion a year, qualitative easing measures (which haven't worked and didn't work when Bush did it either), and questionable investments such as green jobs.

3. The Economy (as viewed as a bunch of markets). Giving specifics here is a bit harder because it's a lot of tiny things spread out. One example that the Obama campaign ironically airs ads about is an incident where a Chinese tire company wanted to sell American automotive companies (and presumably related industries like post consumption repair shops) cheap tires, cheaper than American made tires. Obama chose to block this from happening, saving 1000 jobs. The problem is that blocking the Chinese also blocked the automotive industry from getting access to cheaper raw goods, which means that they miss out on an opportunity to grow (and so can't create more jobs). Now, the automotive industry in America is much larger than the tire making industry, as one would expect, so it's not clear that blocking free trade even had a positive effect.

4. The Economy (as viewed as a collection of businesses). Businesses like knowing what's going to happen in the future, at least as reliably as predicting the future can be. Thus economists will throw around the terms 'certainty' and 'uncertainty' indicating the general feel of how reliable predictions of the future can be. When businesses are uncertain, they downsized as a hedge against the unknown (of which every human being has an instinctive fear, thus children are afraid of the dark). Obama's administration has done several things that have increased uncertainty in a multitude of ways, including raising taxes, talking about raising taxes, and potentially raising taxes, all at the same time (here I'm referring to taxes that affect businesses). For example, oil companies now pay higher taxes than before, even though they already paid a higher percentage than most other industries to begin with. Obamacare will raise taxes, conveniently not during Obama's first term, but only in the one after. In addition tax increases, heavier regulations on various industries increase the operating costs of those industries, thus weakening their outlook, which can be seen in increased regulations in automotive, oil, agricultural, and pharmaceutical industries, among others (notably most heavily on industries that don't typically contribute to the Democrats).

There might be more, but those are the big ones off the top of my head. For sources, open a search engine. Also, Obama has done a few noteworthy positive things in regards to the economy, such as promoting shovel-ready projects (which is an initiative that fell apart for reasons that I am not aware of). I only listed what was wrong because that's what you asked for.

EDIT: On a different topic,

I have to say that your last line is fundamentally untrue. You can doubt something without asserting its opposite. "I don't know" does answer the question, in the neutral. Are squees blurkish? You could answer that yes, or you could answer that no, but most likely you'll say "I don't know what that means/ what you are asking" if you believe it a serious question to be answered seriously.
As to the question "Does God exist?", theists assert "yes", atheists assert "no", agnostics assert "inconclusive".

So you know that God exists? Please, share your evidence to the rest of the world and end this debate once and for all.
Nobody on the planet knows that God exists. People merely believe. There are some people who claim to know, but these people are idiots. So by definition, everybody is Agnostic.
The question isn't "Does God exist?", the question is "Do you think God exists?". There are only two possible answers here. Either you think he exists or you don't. There is no third alternative. Even if you aren't sure about your opinion, you still have one.
Self proclaimed Agnosts say "I don't know if my opinion is fact or not" without actually stating what this opinion is. It is an empty statement that does nothing to answer the question.

Wow romney that's amazing thankyou for telling us of your master plan o thankyou lord you just work your magic and it'll all be fine. romney 2012

and obama youll defnitely rase 7trillion just form taxes on the rich, thats a grate plan

My evidence is not independently verifiable, so while I know, I cannot prove it to others. And even with changing the question, you're still wrong. "Do you think God exists?" "I don't know" is the same as "no opinion", which is not the same as "no". Again, you can doubt something without asserting the opposite. That's rather basic epistemology.

Then you don't know. You think. You don't know anything until you have enough evidence to proof it beyond any reasonable doubt.
And "no opinion" still doesn't answer what they think. You either think God exists or that he doesn't. There is no third option possible. You can doubt, but your gut still leans one way or the other.
I don't know if God exists and I won't ever claim to. So I'm Agnostic. However, I don't think he does. I have nothing to prove he doesn't and if there is convincing evidence pointing to the opposite, I will change my views. But as it is, I simply don't think God exists. So I'm also an Atheist. The two are not mutually exclusive. They are barely related. They are two orthogonal directions on the religiosity spectrum.

So science proves things but it is unable to prove the existence of god. Yeah, I can't believe in god until I can physically see him.

Bonus: http://www.wayofthemind.org/2006/09/27/why-do-people-believe-in-god/

Nope.

False. If I watch something happen, but don't take a photo, I can't prove I saw that thing happen, but I'll know it did. You might try an Evil Demon Thought Experiment argument against me here, at which point I will say solipsism and then there's no reason to listen to you because I can't prove you exist.


I've never heard anyone propose something like this. You are saying the two axies are knowledge and belief, then? Most people generally consider these to be mutually exclusive. Normally, it's one axis that goes Affirmative knowledge, affirmative belief, neutral, negative belief, negative knowledge.

I apologize, I should have made myself more clear. I didn't mean to prove it to another person, but to yourself. Knowledge is a justified true belief. If you have no proper justification for your belief, you don't know. Even if your belief does turn out to be true, you can't claim to have known so unless you had proper justification for this belief. You might think you have known, but in actuality you didn't.
And I am well familiar with the solipsism. That is why I added "beyond any reasonable doubt". I know that it is impossible to actually know anything beyond that you are, that you think and that you perceive. This is hard knowledge. But because it isn't pragmatic to limit knowledge merely to these three truths, we also use soft knowledge. Knowledge that hasn't been proven to be entirely correct, but has been justified to such an extend that it would be foolish not to trust it.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_atheism
Many people use both terms improperly today, so I'm going to examine the roots of these words to find out their true definitions.
Theism comes from the Greek word theos, which means God. Theism refers to the belief in the existence of at least one deity, with a deity being a supernatural or preternatural beings who interact with nature using unnatural abilities.
The prefix a- is the negation prefix in Greek. Any word that gets preceded by the prefix a- is translated as "not that word".
Combining this, Atheism translates to "not Theism". Using Aristotle's Three Laws of Thought, anything contains either a property or the negation of this property. If you have a property A, any object in existence is either A or not-A. As such, Atheism is the collection of any belief that doesn't include any form of Theism.
Agnosticism comes from gnosis, which means knowledge. Combined with the prefix a-, it means that knowledge, generally regarding the existence of a deity, is either not known at present time or is fundamentally unknowable.
Knowledge is a justified true belief. You can have a belief that you don't know is true or even that you know isn't true. It merely refers to what you think is true, not to what you know is true.

I would also like to note the implied fallacy of Agnosticism. Agnostics claim it is pointless to discuss the existence of a deity because it can neither be proved that he does exist or doesn't. However, they fail to prove whether this can proven or not. For several decades, it was thought that the Copenhagen and Local Hidden Variable interpretations of quantum mechanics would result in equal outcomes in every possible experiment and that it was impossible to prove which of the two interpretations was the correct one. Then Bell came with his famous Inequalities and showed that it was in fact possible to do an experiment to proof if the Local Hidden Variables interpretation was correct or not.
As of yet, it is unknown if it is possible to prove if the existence of God is provable. And until such a time, it is inherently fallacious to claim to be Agnostic. Unless you also claim to be Agnostic about Agnosticism, in which case you might as well lock yourself up in a dark room and forget yourself in your solipsism.

Ninja:
Isa, your arguments makes a pretty fundamental mistake. It assumes that Theism is ill defined. It is not. A Theist is anyone who believes in any super- or preternatural sentient being capable of interacting with the natural world with non-natural abilities. If you are a Naturalist, you are automatically an Atheist.
Furthermore, the question "Do you belief in God?" does specify which God. This God always refers to the Abrahamic God, generally the Christian deity. While there is still some variation between the various interpretations of this God, they are similar and restricted enough that it is possible to state whether you belief in one of them or not.

I have done this.

While your examination of the root words is interesting, such examinations are not always proper. Are there not words that hold meanings that are entirely unrelated to their root words?

As for citing Aristotle, I laugh at this, considering Aristotle also believed that thought occurred in the heart and that the brain was a large cooling mechanism. It is clear to see that the world doesn't exist in a solely binary way, take color for example. Is brown red or not red? It contains red, but it isn't red. We could say anything containing red should be called red and anything entirely without red is not red, but this leads to a very unnatural view of what color is (we end up calling yellow, red). Well then, maybe we can just say the property here is whether or not something has color at all (i.e. air vs tree). But this too seems unnatural, to be unable to talk about the red-ness of an object. So, I will concede it is possible to think of the world in this way (I am a cs student after all), it doesn't seem to be a reasonable thing to do if you have other options.

EDIT:
Also, I believe you have defeated yourself with that link.

So they are atheistic for one reason and agnostic for another. There's no reason to suppose you couldn't switch these two positions, resulting in someone who doesn't hold a belief in the existence of any deity and asserts that the existence of any deity is unknowable, which describes perfectly most agnostics I've met.

EDIT2:
Here's a better defined page, IMO. Agnosticism, according to wiki