Also, where does this idea of atheists hating God come from?
If one reads the Bible as one would read any other fiction book, then IMO it’d be pretty hard to conclude that this “God” character is anything other than the villain of the story. This doesn’t mean that atheists “hate God”, no more than anyone could be said to “hate Voldemort”, of course—both of them are just evil fictional characters, no more and no less.
Christians, on the other hand, believe that a God of some sort actually does exist, and when they hear atheists talking about the character of “God” in fiction, they assume that atheists are in fact talking about the real (from the Christians’ point of view) God. Hence the confusion.
In my own experience, one hears the claim more often as “atheists hate religion” rather than “atheists hate god”. The likelihood of hearing it seems to correlate with how intolerant a brand of religiosity one is dealing with (I can’t think of an easy way to test that intuition empirically at the the moment), so I tend to attribute it to projection.
If one reads the Bible as one would read any other fiction book, then IMO it’d be pretty hard to conclude that this “God” character is anything other than the villain of the story. This doesn’t mean that atheists “hate God”, no more than anyone could be said to “hate Voldemort”, of course—both of them are just evil fictional characters, no more and no less.
Christians, on the other hand, believe that a God of some sort actually does exist, and when they hear atheists talking about the character of “God” in fiction, they assume that atheists are in fact talking about the real (from the Christians’ point of view) God. Hence the confusion.
In my own experience, one hears the claim more often as “atheists hate religion” rather than “atheists hate god”. The likelihood of hearing it seems to correlate with how intolerant a brand of religiosity one is dealing with (I can’t think of an easy way to test that intuition empirically at the the moment), so I tend to attribute it to projection.