I don’t believe in God, but I’m afraid of Him.

Taken at face value, the line captures a paradox common in cultures shaped by strong religious traditions: intellectual disbelief coexisting with an emotional residue of fear, awe, or superstition. It suggests that “God” can function less as a metaphysical conviction than as a psychological and cultural presence—an internalized authority, moral judge, or inherited dread. In a writer like García Márquez, whose fiction often treats faith, myth, and the supernatural as social facts regardless of their objective truth, the remark can be read as pointing to the persistence of religious imagination even in the skeptic. The fear is not proof of belief; it is evidence of how deeply a religious worldview can imprint itself.