A higher force

[Excited Penguin]

I agree. But, I think, I can almost get where they're coming from and why some are more comfortable with considering such a possibility than a god. For some, God has a bad, religious stigma about it. So is it that this "life force"(excuse me if I'm calling it wrongly, I'm just trying to be more versatile here) is actually another name for a deistic god, or what?

Whenever I try and imagine what it is people mean by this I just think of some sort of a celestial object that is extremely powerful, or something like that   .

P.S. I'm sure at least some of you here will attest to the fact that they've heard about some form of belief or another in this general area of a "higher force". If not, though, let me bring you up to date. There is a group of people out there that whenever you ask them about religion they just answer something like this: I believe there's something out there, greater than us...". Yeah, I know, confusing, right?

Atheists do not rule out the possibility of a higher power or a god, they just do not see evidence for the existence of either, so there is no reason to believe.

I'm not sure why the need to linger on this point all the time, though. I see it more and more. Of course we can't rule some things out. You can't prove a negative, for one, and also we don't know everything about the cosmos for us to be able to be 100% certain about anything. That would be absurd. 

I'm not ruling God or higher powers out either. Not completely so, at least(but then, can you ever rule out non-specific things like that?). It's just that they're such ridiculous and bizarre claims that I might as well say they're false, for the sake of the argument. Many atheists seem to miss the point on this, namely that we wouldn't even be talking about such things if there weren't someone to bring them up in the first place - there's no need to be so anti-dogmatic that you come full circle and actually end up defending dogma.