i am afraid i don't hang out much with christians, not religious ones anyway. i never did. i was raised a secular jew, and i was taught all the secular things judaism stands for (basically the concept that if everyone isn't free, no one is free, and no one should go hungry or be enslaved or be abused) but not the whole god thing. so i never connected being a proper human being with anything related to god. that is due to the secular nature of my upbringing. even in less secular judaism, the whole "god is love" thing would be weird. we just don't SAY that.

g

Remember that all religious people are not the same. A recent PEW poll shows that only about 14% of Church folks are of the radical political variety. Most church people that I know are warm hearted and kind.

Even if some religious pretenders are hateful it won’t help matters to be hateful toward them.

A good observation. Most I know made the same observation decades ago. It was comparatively a small factor in analyzing the lack of merit for any religions dishonest faith (belief without evidence) claim of truth.

I came to the conclusion that the promised holy spirit never came.

The religious, who all would profess to believe in a loving God, think nothing of disobeying his commandments when it suits them. They are extremely selective in which passages from the bible they choose to pay attention to. I can’t understand what motivates them, but it is quite clear that it is human and not divine inspiration which drives most of them. Religious people are all full of contradictions, probably because the Bible itself is a confusing and contradictory book, and is not evidence based, but more like an anthology of folk tales, superstitions and magic acts. It is immaterial to those of us who do not believe that there is a divine being, what the religious do or think, except when they bring their religious views into politics and law-making, because it then impinges on the rest of us.