Do athiests have the right to consider themselves the superior intellect?

Maybe for you.

The real fear of death isn't about my death, but about the death of loved ones, and my years yet to come when they are gone.

Been there, got the t-shirt.
My favorite people are all dead.
I'm just in existence for movies and ice cream anymore.

The God of religion is, yes. And it's all but impossible for Western man to entirely escape those boxes, regardless of education, sophistication, or personal belief system.

Now Diacanu will ask me for the hundredth time "So what is God, then? Show me something I can hold in my hand." And whatever answer I give him he'll dismiss as "feeeeelllings."

I don't know if hardcore atheists were always this judgmental or if it's just an online phenomenon, but agnostics are habitually dismissed as "So you're really a believer" or "Yer either with us or against us."

There doesn't seem to be any room in the conversation, as El Chup indicated in the OP, for those of us who say "I'm not arrogant enough to say 'I know.' For me it's a matter of lifelong learning."

FTFY.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, feeeeeeliiiings.

^

The way I would put it is that the God of religion is, in many cases, highly specific and disprovable. The general concept of God is not.

This is usually where someone hauls out Santa Claus or leprechauns and insists that if you're agnostic about God, you have to be agnostic about them as well.

Much like Santa Claus and leprechauns, the God who does the exact things described in the Bible is highly improbable.

The God who allegedly made the first woman from the first man's rib, ordered a dude to kill his son, parted the Red Sea, turned some lady into a pillar of salt, and caused Jesus to be bodily resurrected into heaven? Yeah, I'm pretty comfortable calling that a load of horse shit.

But the possibility of a conscious creator, who acted in a way we cannot presently conceive of, is not something I can dismiss as easily out-of-hand.

Why?
Absent cultural influence, why is that a compelling truth claim about the universe?

This^ x 1,000.

It amazes me that someone who has created a universe or two of his own can't grasp this. Or won't.

Because a whole lot of fairly improbable things had to happen in order for life to exist in the first place, let alone for us to evolve into sentience.

Science has done a good job answering "what happened" -- and debunking most cultures' creation myths, including Genesis, in the process -- and has made pretty good strides toward answering "how." But "how" is still not totally answered, and "why" remains a mystery.

Now, I'm certainly not going to rule out the idea that it all happened by chance. The universe is a gigantic place, and even wildly improbable things are bound to happen sooner or later. But is the idea of these wildly improbable things being guided by intelligence of some kind really so much more impossible?

Yeah, but I left my creations pretty clear clues of my presence.

Argument from ignorance.

Imagine that you're a future alien visitor to an Earth devoid of life, and you stumble across Mount Rushmore, the Lincoln Memorial, or the Parthenon. It's certainly possible for those things to exist by some bizarre chance -- the Infinite Monkey Theorem in action -- but would you totally dismiss the idea of a civilization that created them?

To the contemporary human mind. Not necessarily to all intelligent life in the universe, or even to Earth humans in other eras.

Not all of us possess your vast knowledge of All Things.

Frankly, if the entity whose existence we're discussing should be defined in a way that goes beyond all of the ideas usually connected to the word "God", we might be better off not calling it "God". We would then be correct in saying that while God does not exist, something completely unlike God might. For instance, me; I'm unlike God in many ways, and my existence is not as easily ruled out.

But it should have some nameable consequence if the thing exists rather than does not exist; otherwise, we're playing the same game with the word "existence", and things just get silly when you say that you think it is conceivable that God might exist, provided only that you don't really mean God, and you don't really mean it exists, and you don't really mean it's a conceivable possibility.

Those are far more qualifiers than I'd put on it but, okay, let's not call it "God," if that makes you happy. It could be something as silly as this:



or something else entirely. We don't even understand our own little atom of space, and inquiry is allowed into any other field, but "There is no God" slams a door and then mocks anyone who says "I want to see what's on the other side."

Atheist: No, you don't. There's nothing on the other side.
Agnostic: How do you know? Have you opened the door to see what's on the other side?
Atheist: I don't need to. I KNOW there's nothing on the other side. You're just not as evolved as I am.

That's a very severe misrepresentation of atheism indeed.

Is it?

It's a very small sample size based on Internet interactions. Never experienced it in the Real World. There it's usually "Okay, cool. Whatever works for you," not "You're just hedging your bets because you're afraid to die!!!"

Actually, I'm more on the "okay, show me your blueprints for the uber-TARDIS for piercing the barrier", side.

I do not know whether there is a god (or gods), or there isn't, but I would like to know. I like the idea of there being someone, or a group of someones, who set it all in motion.
The problem is that if someone is going insist there is or are, they're going to have to give me some extraordinary evidence. I'm not going to just accept some Johnny-come-Jesus at any turn.

http://wordforge.net/index.php?posts/2657745/

I don't think it's all about death, though some think death and heroism fed into the capacity to imagine gods, such as Barbara Ehrenreich in "Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War" (NY Times excerpt)

I think a fundamental step happened when we became makers and builders, which required quite a mental leap. To a regular animal, things just are. To a person who builds things, things imply builders. You made the stone into a knife, so you are the knife's builder. But who made the stone? You know who made most of the stuff in the village, but who made all the stuff that's lying around outside the village? To the verbs that might be understandable to animals (to chase, to catch, to eat) we added "to make", and perhaps ever since then we've been able to conceive of a maker. Cats can't do this. Thousands of years of living with humans has merely taught them "to open" and "to feed", so they can't yet conceive of a maker.

And?

Intelligent post. Dare we hope for more?

You raise an interesting point. Lots of animals make tools...solely for immediate need. Only advanced hominids, from Australopicus onward, made tools for anticipated future needs. What caused that leap?

Your entire "argument" is an appeal to emotion. Which would make sense if this were a baby step of rebellion against a fundamentalist background, but it isn't even that.

People who are "afraid of death" cling to religion to hedge their bets. They don't reject religion and seek their own answers.

1. I disagree. 2. prove it 3. I thought you were saying corpses are death-barrier -TARDIS-es, and I was wondering if I was going to have to call the men in white coats .