This is a common comparison and a dumb one.

[reposting from - http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/qsu5z/on_the_god_is_in_my_heart_god_is_in_my_mind/ - ]

• There are subjective feelings, emotions, opinions, and ideas.

• There are empirical facts in the objective external world.

No one can prove anything about the former.

It should be quite straightforward to prove the latter.

(Or if we can't provide substantial evidence that proposed fact "X" is true, then we shouldn't believe that proposed fact "X" is true.)

• If I say "I like pistachio ice cream", that's my subjective opinion, and there's no way to prove it.

• If I say, "I have a magnet in this matchbox", it should be very easy to prove or disprove that.

If someone claims that God is a feeling, emotion, opinion, or idea, then that's just their feeling, emotion, opinion, or idea, and it has nothing to do with the objective external world.

On the other hand, if they claim that God empirically exists in the objective external world, then we're entitled to require that they prove that, or else we're under no obligation to believe it.

(In fact, if they can't prove that it's true, then they shouldn't believe it either.)

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So:

• "I like pistachio ice cream" is a statement about my subjective feelings, and it says nothing at all about objective external facts.

• "I feel love for X" is a statement about my subjective feelings, and it says nothing at all about objective external facts. (In fact, come to think about it, people are sometimes passionately in love with imaginary characters who don't exist.)