MANY (most, I think) atheists see religion as an "enemy" ideology because they don't bother to try and understand why theists choose to conceptualize reality as they do.
In the West, theism is mostly Christianity, with a smattering of Judaism, Islam, Bahai, polytheism, etc.. thrown in. Christianity has always been the enemy of atheists, and advocates converting as many people as possible including atheists to Christianity.
It's not until a few decades ago that Christian atheophobia still successfully depicted atheists as the immoral enemies of a good god not fit to adopt, teach, coach, give expert testimony in court, or sit on juries. The reasons are not difficult to identify, and trace back to scripture that describes unbelievers in extremely negative language. Only recently have atheists in the West begun to transcend this bigotry.
Now you ask us to try to understand the theist - to see it from his perspective. I understand why people believe in gods. It's easy and comforting as many have indicated in this thread, Wasn't it you who said that there is a natural proclivity among people to opt for simple answers to unanswered and as yet unanswerable questions in order to deceive themselves into believing that they have greater control over their lives? Is this something to respect? What I respect is the person who rises from his knees to and takes his proper place in the universe as the bipedal ape with some but not all of the answers, who realizes that there may be no gods or anybody else watching over him from afar, that his existence might end with death, that the universe we who populate the surface of this planet may be all the life that there is for light years in every direction, insignificant everywhere but here on earth and even there, to all but a handful of people and animals that may love us, and that things cannot get better if we don't make them better.
Because as far as we know, that's how it is.
many people prefer to conceptualize the Great Unknown (God of the gaps) in terms of a personification. It helps them to feel that they have some sort of interactive control over it.
And some people prefer to call the unknown the unknown. I prefer discussions with the latter rather than hearing about the things people do to comfort themselves. As I indicated above, if we consider that there may be no god overseeing our lives, we can learn to live a more authentic existence rather easily, but apparently only if we begin doing so in the first half of life. There appears to be a window of opportunity here that eventually closes making the transition too costly in terms of shattering world views and social structures previously put into place to affirm and reinforce those beliefs. It's easier to do at 20 or 30 years of age than at 60 or 70.
Millions of people have visited Michelangelo's sculpture "Pieta" and would say that it "spoke to them". That it changed them emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually. And yet there is no reason we should assume that the message they derived from it must be the same from one person to the next.
But it is reasonable to assume that the message came from the observer's own mind and not from the statue. If the statue were the source of the message, the reports would be similar, as when people report to us about a ball game they attended. Notwithstanding differences in the reports, the reports won't contradict one another in any meaningful way, and it will be apparent when facts are reported such that the witnesses are all describing the same game.
It's the variety of descriptions of gods, many if not most mutually exclusive, that lets us know that people are reporting their own psychological states and processes that they mistake for external reality.