I think most, even if they couldn't articulate it, feel that it's 
dangerous not to.

After those of the type I've already talked about (there's only a certain number of times one can repeat the phrase "vicious, stupid and mad" without risking sounding a bit obsessed oneself), I was struck by the frequency with which believers posted the familiar Cartesian argument, that there's nothing to lose by believing if it's untrue, and everything by not believing if it's true. Whether this is one's own foundation for faith, or an argument one thinks might be effective with non-believers, surely it's going to be pretty useless when meeting the Creator? "So, keeping in mind that I know all, please explain how you calculated that you loved Me."*

IMP.

*It was in the introduction to a Gideon Bible that I learned that the business of capitalising the divine pronoun was a translators' introduction, not present in the original. The Gideons also distinguished between "lord" and "Lord", using the latter when the original referred to God as specifically a Jewish military commander. That's that God of love, again.

On the subject of capitals, I wonder whether the tendency of the religious (see Yahoo) to use CAPITALS in an ECCENTRIC and illiterate way, when surely they can see that they're the only ones doing it, is because they read the Bible and observe that it has its own rules, without understanding those rules. All they grasp is that if you're holy, you use CAPITALS In Strange Places.

could you look long enough and far enough in space and eventually find a watch (or any other machine) that formed by mistake

Obviously "mistake" isn't really the word you mean (nobody suggests that the creation of the universe was a "whoops!" moment), but for a far more complex machine than a wristwatch, you don't have to look further than yourself: as complex as you like, and according to all the evidence, developed over a gigantic period of time without conscious design.

IMP.

Well, on the other hand Wayde, we are the only thing we've found so far that is intelligent by our standards.  As much as we are fascinated by the real intelligence in the animal community, we haven't found one yet that we can have a conversation with, or even play a decent game of chess.

Add to that the basic selfishness of looking out for, being interested in the doings of, and enjoying the company of, my own species; I find both of those plenty of reason to _personally_ treat humans as special.

On the whole, as a human being, I agree with you. Philosophically, though, this argument is deeply wrapped in human-centric bias. A daffodil might think of daffodils as the only things so far as rich in the qualities of being daffodils as daffodils are, if daffodils thought that way (or at all). In fact, it might be that one of the qualities of daffodils is not to make that kind of comparison, or to value specialness, or to value giving things value. We value intelligence because we have it, while a giraffe might value long necks, and hold giraffes special because they have them and the rest of us don't. We might be right to value intelligence if intelligence has some objective value; if, on the other hand, leaving as small a footprint on our local part of the universe as possible is the thing of real value, whoops.

Personally, I can't imagine what might be special objectively. Special to whom? For what? Objectively, I think, nothing we value matters. It all just is; we all just are.

IMP.

A few million years ago, our ancestors came down from the trees and moved out into a very different and in many ways more hostile environment. That environment encouraged them to become bipedal -- tho only very minor changes were made to accomplish this, which is why humans suffer from lower back pains while gorillas don't -- and becoming bipedal made it possible for our ancestors front paws to develop into really amazing tools, almost unmatched in the Animal Kingdom. Those fancy new tools required a fancier brain, and to accomplish this the brain got much larger -- tho the birth canal did not enlarge to deal with this gigantic new head, which is why human females go thru agonizing labor pains, while female gorillas don't.

Anyway, with that new big brain came a whole lot of superfluous circuitry that contributed not one whit to human survival, but did eventually give us places where we could develop things like art and science and literature and music and religion -- none of which animals other than us have much use for. Which is fine, since they didn't evolve those parts of the brain. Didn't need 'em.

So, remember, animals are not necessarily dumb because they don't talk or play chess. They just have other things to worry about.

Thomas wrote:

Something beyond life if that can even be imagined.

**

Sure, that sort of thing is possible, and there have been thousands of good and bad SF written based on that or similar premises.  They can be very entertaining as fiction.  Why human societies would want to arrange Sunday activities around these fictions becomes the obvious next question. 

Is there life superior to us?  Absolutely.  Find yourself alone in the middle of the ocean and there's going to be no shortage of life that's superior to you.  Try to convince the shark that you're at the top of the food chain and watch him smile at you.  We don't have to invent lifeforms (or beyond-lifeforms) to feel inferior.  As a species we've got no natural predators big enough for us to see without  a microscope.  But as individuals we'd be hard pressed to take on a racoon empty-handed. 

I've got no beef with a person's spirituality.  Whatever relationship a person might have with their own version of a higher power is generally harmless unless the person is psychotic.  It's when a million or a billion people get together and start posting rules that everyone has to abide by that I start to get annoyed.  Spirituality only affects you.  Religion affects me, whether I want it to or not.  And while I can't disprove your spirituality (assuming I would want to) I can disprove the validity of religions without much effort.

Whatever relationship a person might have with their own version of a higher power is generally harmless unless the person is psychotic. 

---------

Or if your baby needs blood to live and you're a perfectly normal, observant Jehovah's Witness.

Which fits my definition of psychotic.  You have abandoned generally accepted reality in favor of a harmful delusion. 

edit to add qualification for "reality"

And they always have and always will.  Consider that one of the cornerstones of Christian belief is that God imbued us with free will, then made it a sin to employ free will when applied to God himself according to the First Commandment.

Doesn't get much more fuctup that that.