ANGER HAS VALUE SO IS IT AN EVIL OR A SIN?

Anger encourages many people to assert justice for it happens when an injustice of a rather serious nature is perceived.  If people are angry at what you say about them or their lifestyle it is a sure indication that in an important way, perhaps deep down, they believe or know you are right.

Seneca believed that of all the bad passions we can have anger is the most common and most dangerous and irrational one. Aristotle surmised that anger is you seeking to harm another or hoping that bad things will happen to them just because you want them to. Without the direct or indirect desire to see harm come anger cannot exist.

Your own hatred and anger can do you a lot of harm.  Yet you seem to think that holding on to them somehow hurts the other person.  It is as if you want to believe they want you to like them and thus by hating them and being mad at them you frustrate them.  It is as if you think your hate and anger have the magical power to hurt them.  Our fondness for magic and wishing it were real is part of the reason why hate and anger are problems in the world.  Religion even when it condemns magic is in fact thriving on it.

Hatred is unjustly wanting to hurt another person. It is pretending there is little or no value in that person.

Anger is wanting to hurt a person because of feelings and not because of reason. If you are maddened by somebody putting too much sugar in your tea you are not angry for a rational reason for lots of other mistakes don’t bother you. It is not something going wrong that makes you angry, it is the way you respond to it that does that. So, anger is an unnecessary evil and is hatred and is incompatible with love. Anger is hatred for what you know not what you feel should determine how you relate to others.

Some say that when you feel like, DIRECTLY verbally or even physically, attacking the person you think did something wrong that is anger.  They say that indirect abuse such as ruining somebody's reputation is to be termed disgust not anger.  I would say it does not matter how you attack - wanting to hurt is anger.  And indirect abuse is intended to make things bad for the victim.

Those who say they are not angry for they have no reason to be are fools.  You don't need a reason but a trigger for anger is about feelings.

Jesus said it is a sin to be angry with your brother without cause.  He did not say neighbour but brother and to his audience it would have been seen as confirming the Jewish doctrine that love your neighbour only meant love other Jews.  It was ordinary people he was talking to and a good teacher should be interpreted through the eyes of his society and the people he addresses.  Jerome in his Against the Pelagians 11:7 was clear that when Jesus said you must not be angry with your brother [for no good reason] that most of the reliable and ancient copies of the text did not qualify it with “for no good reason”!  Now that would be an example of a text being unable to tell us whether anger was a sin or not.  It would prove that the Christian claim that no doctrine is affected by problems with texts is a lie.  As Christianity claims a moral core, it is a huge error.

Christianity says it likes anger to be focused on a person’s sins and not on the person. It directs that we exercise prudence. But anger is anti-prudence and when it loses sight of the person and sees the act it becomes even more dangerous. We are selfish creatures and so we will let the anger at being offended or hurt override any perception we have of the dignity of the person.

St Alphonsus wrote, “A man who does not restrain the impulse of anger, easily falls into hatred towards the person who has been the occasion of his passion. According to St Augustine, hatred is nothing else than persevering anger…It appears then that in him in whom anger perseveres, hatred also reigns” (page 255, The Sermons of St Alphonsus Liguori).
 
Jesus got angry. He talked about the wrath of God. His rage is written all over Matthew’s gospel, chapter 23. It would not be in the gospel if anger were frowned upon by him or the gospel.

Let us consider the following in the light of the doctrine that love is doing what is good for others and not about your feelings.  People prefer being liked to being loved for love is an unemotional act or attitude of goodness. Love, in the Christian understanding, is serving others without being motivated by affection for them but you just have the intention to do good. You prefer people doing good for you because they like you which makes them enjoy it than people doing good for the sake of good without feeling. Anger stops you liking a person so how could it be good? You cannot like a person who sins for that would be liking their sins too especially if you treat a sinner as if they never committed the sins.

The cold love of the Christian can only inspire and lead to anger. People need to be liked.

Every religion that stomachs or commends anger is a camouflaged hate group. Anger when the teachings of the religion are denied or neglected is encouraged for faith is supposed to matter most. For example, Christians are urged to transfer all their love and feelings to God and to use others as tools with which to please him. You are to love and like God extremely. Extreme emotion means extreme action. You will find it impossible not to hate sinners and those who do not love God. This cannot be a sin for if it is a side-effect of loving God it is not your fault.