I think atheists would do well to encourage agnosticism, seems like an easier sell to me, training wheels? Much of the atheist movement reeks of fundamentalism. By definition atheism is closed minded. So much of science is unknown. I don't discount the idea that the possibility of collective consciousness or any number of other things viewed as supernatural, and therefore dismissed, exist. Read some theoretical physics, we don't understand a lot of stuff. That stuff could be the basis completely different ways of thinking about reality. It may very well be that what we perceive as reality is a small part, or an expression of something that no one has begun to understand. It's cliche but what if we are programs running on some ultra advanced computer. Would the operator of that computer not be a "god." Dismissing that idea is silly, creating computers of that complexity is science fiction but it certainly isn't out of the realm of possibility. Who's to say we'd be the first one's to do it.