Well, I don't think there is any empirical evidence for any deities existing. As far as non-empirical evidence goes, at best you could speculate that there might be something that can remotely be called a deity in the universe. There's no reason to suppose that the Christian God has to be the specific God that created the universe. There's nearly an infinite number of potential Gods that could exist and it's not clear why people should assume that the Christian God is the one true God. That's usually the argument I make for my Christian friends but they don't believe that argument. And, they often try to convince me to be a Christian because of their concerns so it's not like I can just agree to disagree with them. I have to alleviate their concerns however I can. Most Christians would refuse to believe that there is an evil and sadistic God that sends people to Hell. That's because some Christians believe in Christianity because it's what they want to believe, not necessarily because fundamentalist Christianity has credible evidence:

Here are my top 10 arguments against suicide:

10. Committing suicide will deprive you of the good things in your life.

9. Having a suicidal mindset often times exaggerates your suffering.

8. Any suicide will probably be physically painful.

7. You should try to improve your life before considering suicide.

6. Being a failure or hating yourself is not a good reason to commit suicide. One could hate oneself but be perfectly happy about his life because it is more pleasant and contains less suffering than the life of a successful person. Not all self loathing people live bad lives and not all successful and self-loving people are happy. Besides, would killing yourself really make you feel better about yourself?(Well, I guess it would after you've died though)

5. If you don't have intense and unbearable suffering, then it's better to just continue living your life. Don't worry, one day you're going to die and your suffering will end anyway. But you'll only get to live once.

4. Suicide can cause you to go to Hell. This will make your suffering worse. (This is one only works on religious people who believe in Hell though).

3. Suicide will cause extreme bereavement to your loved ones. Think of how much suffering you will cause your friends and family.

2. Failed suicide attempts can be extremely painful physically and psychologically. They could also lead to permanent disability. If the point of suicide is to reduce suffering, then this could make the problem worse.

1. For every successful suicide, there are roughly 25 unsuccessful attempts. If you're going to kill yourselves, you better know what the Hell you're doing!

Not when it comes to killing folks though? That is one tough kind of individual preference to favor but maybe it's no different than admitting that anyone is free to kill anyone else, so long as they're willing to deal with the collective's consequence. — Nils Loc

Well, in the case of killing people without consent, you would be violating the preference of another individual to not be killed in order to fulfill your preference to have that person killed if you commit the murder. This would be a violation of the murdered individual's strong preference. I wasn't really specific or clear enough by what I meant when I talked about individual and collective preferences so I don't blame you for the misunderstanding. An individual preference is typically a strong interest that one person has for something to happen to him or not happen to him. For example, I could have a preference to be married to Susie but Susie might have a preference not to be married to me. Because both of our preferences are strong and I could only fulfill my preference by violating her preference, it would be unjust for me to violate her preference by forcing Susie to marry me. On the other hand, a collective preference is more like a series of weak preferences held together by a multitude of individuals towards the same unified consequence. For example, imagine most people in a local village in Africa have a preference to stone a woman for cheating on her husband. No one in that village, except maybe her husband, has a strong preference to have her stoned but rather a flimsy one. The woman, on the other hand, has a strong preference not to be stoned. Therefore, the strong preference of an individual should be privileged over the weak preferences of a collective. I hope this clears up any confusion.

Well, suicide stigma seems to be worse in collectivist societies in my opinion. In collectivist societies, people often have a duty to their families, their community, and country. While in more individualistic societies, people have a duty only for their own personal well being and the well being of their children until they are 18. Collectivist societies are less likely to respect people's autonomy because the morality of the collectivist societies is often centered around social cohesion rather than respecting individual rights. Obviously there are some exceptions, but generally speaking this seems to be the case. A collectivist culture is more likely to think it has a duty to prevent people from committing suicide and it's also more likely to think the individual has a duty not to kill themselves for their family, friends, community, and state. This can often be used justify violating a individual's autonomy to decide to commit suicide. Although, on rare occasions, collectivist societies might even encourage people to commit suicide if they are a burden to their collective. I personally think that the preference of the individual should usually outweigh the preference of the collective in regards to suicide or any other issue. That is because while there are more preferences in a collective, they are weak compared to the preferences that the individual has for himself.

We often tend to think of a rational suicide as committed by a calm mannered person who had realized on the basis of philosophical inquiry that life is not worth continuing. While an irrational suicide is one that we labeled as caused by a mental illness and therefore some of us think we are morally justified in violating the autonomy of that type of suicidal person because we ought to treat some adults like children. I tend to think the most "irrational" suicides are actually the most rational ones. If you are mentally ill and suffering because of your depression, anxiety, or PTSD, you have a better reason for killing yourself than the intellectual who thinks he derived truth about the futility of existence.
As far as the issue of autonomy goes, I do think it is wrong to prevent a suicide from happening in many cases. The justification that because some people are not in their right mind because of mental illness and therefore cannot exercise their autonomy doesn't seem to work for several reasons:
1. Mental illness is a social construct on some level. That is not to say that it's not "real" but rather that the line between a healthy and a mentally ill individual is arbitrarily drawn. Why not raise or lower the bar for what constitutes mental illness? Why not say that the majority of people in our society are mentally ill? We can't simply claim that someone is wrong about their desire to die because our society deems it wrong. We have to have a demonstration of why we have strong reason to think that existence is better than nonexistence. I don't believe that we have that strong reason.
2. Should all people perceived as irrational lose their autonomy? If we use the reasonableness of a person as a marker of "maturity sufficient for autonomy", then should we also be justified in violating the autonomy of anyone we deem as not capable of making good decisions? If someone wants to be irresponsible and spend his life gambling, drinking, doing drugs, and having sex with hookers, then are we justified in violating his autonomy for his own sake? I think it's more reasonable to commit suicide under great suffering from mental illness than it is to gamble away your life savings. But I think we can agree that we should respect the autonomy of the irresponsible people because we think most consenting adults have a right to autonomy without much exception. I think it's safe to say most suicidal people are reasonable enough to fit the category of adults that should be able to act accordingly to their wishes.
3. A person who is suffering from mental illness paradoxically has a good reason to commit suicide. You might suppose that not seeking help for that mental illness first is irrational but let's face us: we don't know how to effectively treat mental illnesses.

There are 3 ways this question can be interpreted and answered:

1. What are the marks of an influential intellectual? These are the types of intellectuals that have made the biggest impact in their field of study. Without them, many succeeding intellectuals wouldn't have existed(For example, we could argue that if Plato was never born, the whole history of western philosophy would be radically different. Of course, it could of been better or worse without Plato so we can't assume his impact was positive necessarily.)

The marks of an influential intellectual seem to be:
-Creativity/Originality
-Charisma
-Determination
-Confidence
-Sometimes Arrogance
-Disagreeableness
-Willingness to face persecution for one's beliefs

2. What are the marks of a competent/skilled intellectual? These are intellectuals that have the greatest capacity to think. You can think of them as a kind of virtuoso in thinking. They can maybe write a complicated book in like a couple of weeks or have extensive knowledge in a variety of disciplines. They can understand incomprehensible concepts and come up with complicated ideas. They might employ skilled rhetoric also. Although, despite their skill in thinking, they might not make any meaningful contribution to the history of human though.

The marks of a competent intellectual are:
-Extreme Intelligence
-Great memory and fast thinking
-Interest in a variety of subjects
-Obsession with thinking for its own sake
-Having nothing better to do with their time other than working on intellectual pursuits.

3. What are the marks of an Admirable/Praiseworthy intellectual? These are intellectuals worthy of respect regardless of what opinion you have of their ideas. It is the spirit and the attitude by which they think that makes them special. I think Socrates, in many ways, fits this ideal. He has a genuine curiosity and a desire to learn and understand. For him, thinking isn't about promoting your ideas or showing how smart you are, it is about trying to discover the truth together.

The marks of an admirable intellectual are:
-Humility
-Intellectual Honesty
-Curiosity
-Desire to understand
-Agreeableness
-Good listening skills

I don't think that it makes sense to have anxiety about something that cannot be avoided and inevitably happens. I think anxiety has purpose in our lives to protect us from harm and to allow us to be more cautious in certain situations. For example, some amount of social anxiety actually helps us socialize better by inhibiting us from saying socially awkward and rude stataments. Death anxiety serves us with the purpose of allowing us to avoid an early death. A person not afraid of death might be more likely to do wreckless activities and so there's survival benefits to death anxiety. But the problem with death anxiety is that it persists as you age. In fact, older people seem to have more death anxiety than younger people but younger people could use it more. A young person might live an unhealthy lifestyle because he doesn't care if he dies early. It's just too far away for him to worry about it anyway. An older person is often anxious about death but it would be better to be carefree about it. It will happen anyway so you might as well not stress yourself out over it.
While we can acknowledge that death anxiety isn't useful in old age, it is hard for us to get rid of this anxiety. But I think recognizing the absurdity of it is the first step. Anxiety usually occurs because we recognize a particular situation as dangerous. But if we are to be in inevitable defeat, we might as well calmly walk into the battlefield for our mortality. Another thing to consider is that it's not clear how death is bad if you don't believe in any afterlife. If death is like being under general anesthesia and never waking up, then it's hard to see what's so bad about that. You won't feel the perception of time so it will feel like no time has passed at all and the infinity of nonexistence will pass by infinitely fast. Though, I think it's hard for a conscious mind to imagine not having consciousness and that's why people often don't believe they will ever die. It's just beyond their imagination and they find the strangeness of death intimidating.

"Also, none of this has anything to do with atheism. If one doesn't believe in a God, why bother with anything He supposedly does"

I believe that it is relevant for atheists to try to empathize with how Christians might feel about their atheism. This is why this topic is something I wish to understand. There are people in my life who are concerned about my atheism because they believe I will go to hell if I don't repent. I find your view on this subject to be beneficial and interesting to some extent since it could perhaps alleviate the concerns of my loved ones. I'm often stuck in conversation trying to convince my Christian friends that they shouldn't be so concerned about me going to hell forever since it's inconceivable how a loving God would punish someone for an unlimited amount of time for reasonable skepticism about his existence. I would love to know if there's any way I could convince my loved ones to accept annilationism or at least the view that Hell does not last indefinitely and that we can escape from it like you have described. It seems like the Bible does suggest eternal torture for non believers though and I don't blame Christians for thinking that this is what the Christian God requires. Although, as an atheist, I don't think there's any centralized view that the Bible holds about Hell. That is because I think the Bible is written by a collection of people with different opinions and philosophies rather than based on the actual unified philosophical position of God who does not exist and therefore had no role to be play in advising the authors of the Bible.

It seems that most Christians do not think that bad people go to Hell but rather that non-believers go to Hell. That is because, supposedly, Jesus Christ paid the price of everyone's sins and so any believer can go to Heaven, no matter how many bad actions they committed. On the other hand, if you do not accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior, then you will go to Hell for eternity regardless of how little you sinned or how virtuous you were. I once asked a Christian to justify how a supposedly just and benevolent God would think this is a fair system. I was told that God doesn't send people to Hell but rather they choose to go to Hell by refusing God. Of course, my immediate question was exactly how I could be refusing God if I don't recall any deities offering to me any kind of salvation. If God popped out of the sky and offered me salvation instead of going to Hell, I would certainly accept his salvation and do whatever he asks of me. But I don't understand how some Christians can think that atheists simply are choosing to reject God when there's no empirical evidence for there being a God that offers us salvation and warns us about Hell. If you have empirical knowledge that such a God exists, then you probably should cut down on the shrooms bro

I think rights should perhaps be viewed as preferences that must be respected legally or morally. You can think about the Golden rule, for example. We should treat others how we would like to be treated to some extent because we all benefit if we all agree to do this simultaneously. This allows us to create trust and form a small society. But, what happens when you treat someone how you would like to be treated but they don't like how you are treating them? For example, imagine that a man wants to be euthanized because he hates his life. Does that mean it would be ok for him to euthanize someone else under the Golden Rule? Well, not exactly. There's a bit of a paradox in the Golden Rule. The suicidal man might wish to be euthanized but he does not wish to have one of his preferences violated. Therefore, he wouldn't be following the Golden Rule if he euthanized an unconsenting individual. Because one has to respect the other persons preference to follow the Golden Rule unparadoxically, we could reframe the Golden Rule as "treat others how THEY wish to be treated". In other words, give everyone what they want. But, of course, we cannot give everyone what they want and so we can't follow that rule completely. It appears to be more reasonable to require that people don't give people what they don't want instead. In other words, one ought not to violate the preference of others by an act of commission(although one is not obligated to perform an act of commission to satisfy one's preferences). Over time, we made a list of preferences that we think should never be violated by an act of commission. These include:
-The preference to utter any statement or no statement at all(The Right to Free Speech)
-The preference to practice any religion or no religion at all(The Right to Religion)
-The preference to not be murdered(The Right to Life)
-The preference to not be enslaved(The Right to Freedom)

I know this isn't probably the whole explanation for human rights but I think it's a good start. In conclusion, human rights are a byproduct of a collective human desire to exist with one another in peace and harmony. We all benefit by avoiding the unjust violation of anyone's preferences and we wish that no one would violate ours unjustly

"2. Birth is neutral because it contains both suffering and the ability of rising above it and gain happiness (which is your benefit). Looking only at the negative gives you a skewed perception of morality."

If there are both good and bad aspects of existence, that does not necessarily mean that existence is neutral overall. In fact, the only way that existence is completely neutral is if there is exactly as much good in life as there is bad in life. An antinatalist would argue that since it is reasonable to suppose that life overall contains more bad than good, then performing an act of commission without the permission of the person most affected by the act would be wrong because the person created could reasonably resent the fact that he was created. Many philosophers would object to this logic by stating that procreators have no way of asking their future offspring for permission. An Antinatalist could respond to this objection by arguing that, in similar cases, it would also be wrong to perform an act of commission that could reasonably be viewed as a net harm without permission even when permission could not be acquired. For example, imagine that a surgeon has to choose whether or not to operate on an unconscious patient. If he operates on the patient, the patient will experience a tremendous amount of suffering, but if he refuses to operate the patient will die. Some antinatalists would argue that it's better to let the patient die because you have no obligation to save that patients life but you do have an obligation not to cause the patient extreme suffering. Although, if the surgery in question only involves minor suffering, then the fact that the patient cannot grant consent may be overridden by a reasonable assumption that the patient wants his life saved and is willing to endure the minor suffering. An antinatalist would typically think it is reasonable to wish to not be born though and therefore we shouldn't procreate since we don't have a duty to create anyone but we have a duty not to inflict harm onto them.