...mostly "atheists" seem to be people who hate God, not disbelieve in God.
I've never encountered anyone who meets that description and I don't think it makes any sense. Now, a lot of atheists hate
Christians, and maybe that even has something to do with them becoming atheists, but believing in God and hating him? I can't wrap my head around that.
I know RC thinks I never let ten words do when a few hundred might work as well,
but what the heck, like eye color and addiction, it’s in my DNA…
I agree with you that atheism precludes a dislike of something a person is convinced isn’t there, Rev, but you really have never encountered the phenomenon of people who say they’re atheists but seem absolutely obsessed with hating God? That surprises me, because I have seen that a lot.
Oh, I get hating some Christians, I spent a lot of my younger days unfairly lumping a couple billion people in with the book burning Moral Majority sorts. I also understand anger toward God, and think it takes strong intellectual muscles to even subscribe to the idea an unseen God could possibly exist in a world so full of pain.
The concept of so many atheists hating God clicked with me long ago when I heard a George Orwell quote:
“He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him….”
And when I heard that, I thought….Orwell was right, there are those sorts of atheists. And when I realized that, I noticed most people I knew who said they were atheists seemed to spend a lot of time hating this God they claimed wasn’t even there.
Like Penn Jillette (whom I like very much in general, by the way) he will take almost any chance to tell you there is no God, yet he also gleefully calls this being he doesn’t believe in a “prick” and some other things I probably shouldn’t type here. That’s anger.
Or the insightful XTC song Dear God, it concludes by saying “I don’t believe in you” only after addressing this supposedly non-existent personage and indicting it with a multitude of crimes. How can you indict “nothing” with “something”?
You can’t call yourself an atheist and have it both ways, maintaining God doesn’t exist, yet making God a legitimate target of anger. That’s like me blaming Santa for not bringing me that hair crimper when I was nine.
I do believe atheists exist and know some, usually get along fine with them, but I know a lot more angry sorts who do seem to hate God and then manifest that hatred in saying they don’t believe in God. (I also notice those types seem to be under a certain age, to be honest, and evolve away from that when they’re older. Go figure, eh?)
Slightly off topic but I married a man who is so apathetic about the question of God’s existence he genuinely does not care about the topic enough to try to define the word that best describes how he feels about God. He’ll go to church with his mom if she asks him for a special reason, and then walk out and not be able to tell you what the church service was about. But that’s another sort of person altogether, neither believer, nor agnostic, nor atheist. (I sometimes envy him….)
Lot of shades of color in white light.