Most of those things could be proven to exist. All you'd have to do is find one and take a picture, and if possible, take something as physical evidence.
Most, but not all. There are some which it is infeasible or by definition impossible to acquire physical evidence thereof. Of course, by the same token, there are people who claim that it is possible to take certain things as physical evidence of God - splinters of the Holy Cross, finding the warehouse containing the box holding the Ark of the Covenant, locating Noah's ark, and so on. I'd say the standards of proof involved are pretty even between them all.
But whether or not there are any invisible unicorns (they can't be both pink and invisible)
(It's at least as possible as any being containing any other seemingly contradictory characteristics. And the proponents of the IPU even have an entertaining .PNG image, with two layers; one defines an image of a pink unicorn, the other defines an alpha channel that makes the unicorn effectively transparent - I don't have enough posts yet to offer a link, but it's available at the Wikipedia page for the IPU.)
doesn't make a difference to me. And if I ever see a little green man looking for his pot o' gold, no bit deal. Whether or not I die believing in these things, it will not affect me any.
Well, for me, it's not about whether I /die/ believing in these things, but whether I /live my life/ believing in them - and basing my actions on those beliefs.
I believe in God for very different reasons. Throughout my life, I have seen evidence that my God exists. None of it could be studied in a test tube, but it's just as real to me.
Test tubes are overrated. Evidence is evidence - the tricky part, and the part that few people even think of working on, let along getting a good handle about, is figuring out /which/ evidence is most /useful/ at slicing away falsehoods to arrive at the core of the truth.
My faith is not just something I believe in, hoping it will save me from death.
Pascal's wager is highly overrated.
Although, this is a big part of it, because without the afterlife, all of this is for nothing.
The belief that the only viable philosophy if there's a lack of (post-life) immortality is nihilism is astonishingly common - but is also highly suspect. I want my close family members to continue to have good lives after I die; I want humanity (or sentient life in general) as a whole to avoid extinction after I die; and just because I won't necessarily be around to help out with that doesn't mean that such things don't matter to me while I'm alive.
(And, of course, there's always the transhumanist/singularitian viewpoint. In 25 years, the rate of increase in technology may reach a tipping point in which peoples' expected lifespans start increasing at at least one year per year. Or, there's a theory that suggests a sufficiently advanced computer in the future, which may be able to create a simulation of past events with enough fidelity to create new copies of everyone who's ever lived - and when they die in the simulation, to preserve their mind-states and allow them to continue running in new environments. I've recently been thinking about theories of identity, such as who (if anyone) is really 'you' if an identical copy of you is made; even without a supernatural afterlife, it's possible that some version of 'me' will care very much about the legacy I leave after I die.)
But it also affects the way I live. It changes my outlook on life, it changes the way I spend my time, and it affects my priorities and what I value.
I have the right to believe in whatever I want to believe in. I don't have to accept your standards, and I don't have to put rationality at the top of my list of concerns.
You do, indeed, have that right. The only way I can ensure that /I/ have the right to believe in whatever I do, is to ensure that /everyone/ possesses that same right - no matter how irrational I may believe their beliefs are.
In my opinion, the only life worth living is one walked by faith, not by sight (rationality, certainty, science, the senses).
My opinion isn't quite the opposite. I have chosen, as my ethical standard, "the preservation and promotion of sentient life". (And I sometimes throw in, "especially my own", depending on the phase of the moon.) As long as peoples' faith doesn't get in the way of my helping maximize peoples' rights so they can live the life they choose, then I have no real beef with them - though that doesn't stop me from cheerfully trying to try to nudge their beliefs to place a higher priority on believing things that are consonant with objective physical reality, just as it doesn't stop them from trying to kickstart the 'malfunctioning faith-circuit in my brain'.
