Yea, many schools of Buddhism have a lot of supernatural trappings that are basically ornaments and interpretations from the cultures they grew to prominence in. I think this is why the most popular school of Buddhism in the west is Zen, which strips most of that away.
I don't find this convincing. The arguments are thousands of years old, but most of the relevant data is <200 years old. The reason most religious hackers don't talk about it is that they know better - that unless you're sufficiently vague, believing in supernatural stories born of bronze age cultures is logically indefensible.
Here's a data point for you - I changed my mind because of evolution.
Here we're not really interested in smart people - many smart people believe in God. We're interested in the subset of smart people with a special kind of honesty, the kind great scientists almost always have, and great philosophers often do. The 'smart people' you claim changed their minds because of fashion aren't the ones we're really interested in talking about.
Also, I like to distinguish between deliberate atheists (like myself) and people who are atheists by default. Some people are apathetic about philosophical questions and will say they don't believe in God simply because they weren't brought up with any religion.
At Justin.tv, Emmett has a framed picture of pg with this caption.