Am I still an atheist if I believe in a higher being?

[Redbeard The Pink]

You are quite mistaken in claiming that one cannot prove the nonexistence of something.  Anything whose definition is self-contradictory cannot exist.  Thus, there are no invisible pink unicorns, because "pink" and "invisible" contradict each other.  We can also know that things don't exist that do not fit with known facts.  For example, how messed up the world is, is incompatible with a being that is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly benevolent, so such a being cannot exist.  We can know that Santa does not exist because people have visited the north pole and his workshop is not there.  That, though, was unnecessary, as we know it is impossible for one man to visit every house on the planet in one night, and it is impossible for a man to fit down every chimney (not to mention the fact that not every house has a chimney).  The idea that one cannot prove that some things do not exist is just false.

I go on to clarify in a later post that it's not logically unsound to rule out the existence of an impossible object. Those can be proven to not exist by showing them to be impossible, as I stated earlier. Perhaps this first statement was overly simplistic, which is why I expounded on it with the whole "Unicorns Vs. Square Circles" analogy.

Personally, I actually consider god to be an impossible object, in part for the reasons you described and in part for other reasons I've already mentioned. I consider myself a gnostic atheist because, by every use of the word I've ever encountered, some part of god's definition ALWAYS renders him either fictional or no longer a god.