EVEN IF LOVING SINNER AND HATING SIN IS POSSIBLE
DOES IT FOLLOW THAT WE SHOULD THINK CHRISTIANS DO IT?
If you want to be good at abusing and hurting another
person, tell them you do it because you love them.
Religion advocates cold-blooded hatred and dresses it up so that it still
manages to come up smelling of roses. I am referring to its doctrine: “Hate the
sin but love the sinner”. To hate is to oppose the wellbeing of. To oppose the
wellbeing of anything is an act of violence. The absurdity of hating a thing and
wanting to hurt it, does not mean you cannot be stirring up love of violence in
you. The absurdity shows you are guilty of hating and trying to hide it.
Why should we believe Catholics who claim that they love gay people and other
sinners but hate their sin? You sin as a person therefore the other person
either loves you and does not care about your sin or the other person hates your
sin and therefore hates you. Hating sin is just another expression for hate the
sinner.
Loving the sinner and hating the sin is the advice that the Church gives the
world. It is false advice for it cannot be done. Can you trust the sinner and
not the sin? Can you punish the sin and not the sinner? Can you curse the sin
and not the sinner? Can you ostracise the sinner and not the sin? If it is just
to punish the sin then it must be just to punish the sinner. Christians are
fully aware of the hypocrisy - they don't believe anybody who tells them they
hate their Christianity but love them. Christians call to hate. They demand that
you hate and then do the additional evil of lying about it that it is really
love you do.
The advice is more than advice. The Church makes it a command. Therefore it is
oppressive and rooted in violent desires and intolerance.
Those who teach that we must like God love the sinner and hate the sin never
explain what they mean. They just say it and move on as if it is an
embarrassment. This shows no genuine concern for helping people live better
lives. It does show concern for being seen as good. But it only produces
passive-aggressive hypocrites.
We tend to be grateful to things when they benefit us. We feel a sense of
gratitude towards the car that gets us to hospital. We kick and curse the car
and swear at it when it breaks down. We treat events and things as if they
consciously bless us and curse us. If you really hate a sin, you are
personifying it and you are as good as hating a person. That hate will be just
as poisonous as hating a person and make you bitter and dangerous.
CS Lewis said we always have the generosity to love ourselves and hate our
sins so we can do this for other people. If we really hate them we will
punish ourselves with guilt. Hate is punishing yourself over some evil. If
we do this wrong to ourselves over evil, then we are training and opening
ourselves up to do wrong to others for the evil they have done or that we
have perceived they have done. We are abusing ourselves and putting others
under threat for we are training ourselves in evil. Hating sin makes it
harder to forgive yourself.
Catholicism cannot be trusted when it claims to love the sinner despite
finding the sin disgusting and repulsive and hateful. It has a record of
lying. Let us prove this. The Church has even started saying that to say
that the homosexual desire is a disorder is not to say that homosexuals have
a disorder! Or that homosexuality is a disorder but homosexuals are not
disordered. This is gross hypocrisy and it is only spouted to save the
Church from recriminations for preaching hate. If homosexuality is a
sickness or a disorder, then homosexuals are sick. End of. Sin is more
personal than sickness. A sickness happens to you but a sin is something you
cause to happen. Therefore if sin is evil then the sinner is evil. The sin
cannot be separated from the sinner. If having a sickness means you are sick
as a person then how much more does having a sin mean that you are sinful,
that the sin is your bad character or bad nature? We must remember that the
sinner being the sin is not a matter of theory only. It's about what people
really think of the sinner. They identify the sinner with his sin and they
then say they do not.
Christians love sinners so much that they tar somebody who takes revenge on
an evil person with the same brush as the evil person. If a woman cuts up
her cheating husband's clothing the Church nods and says she came down to
his level. She hit back at a bad man. He made dirt of a good woman. There is
a huge difference.
There is no doubt that if we think about what the principle of loving
sinners and opposing their sins does, that its incoherence becomes plain. We
know by instinct that the principle is a lie. Trying to delude ourselves
that Christianity with its fundamental and intrinsic doctrine of hatred of
sin is true cannot paper over this instinct.
If you belong to the Church you will despise and hate sinners for God is
supposed to be the same as goodness and to be loved above all things meaning
you must hate sin for the more you love God the more you will loathe what is
opposed to his will. If you are really in love with God you will be as
furious and irrational when he is insulted as you would be if your darling
spouse were insulted. No - your anger would be off the scale. It would be
worse. If you agree with the Church that you should hate sin then that means
the Church is inciting you to hate sinners.
To say nurses are bad is to say the people who are nurses are bad. Love the
sinner and hate the sin is as silly as love the nurse and hate the woman who
is the nurse. The teaching that we must love the sinner and hate the sin
because we are sinners ourselves suggests that hating the sinner is good but
only if you are not a sinner! It involves wishing you were in a position to
be able to hate the sinner! For that reason alone it would be wise to be
suspicious of anybody who says they love sinners and detest the sins the
sinners do.
The Church hates sinners as proven by the fact that it chooses to pick on
certain kinds of sinners and not others . For example, if you masturbate
that is a serious sin. You are a seriously bad person. But if you refuse to
assist your local businesses and instead travel for all your shopping across
the border the fact that you don’t care about the community you live in
enough to support it with your consumerism is not a serious problem for the
Church! So something harmless or relatively harmless is singled out for
condemnation while worse is almost approved. Smoking does harm - what harm
does masturbation do?
If you love the sinner and hate the sin, is this love better than the love
for a perfect person? Jesus said you deserve no praise for those who love
you but deserve praise for loving those who hate you. The answer then is
yes.
Christians say that to love the sinner is to hate the sin and vice versa.
Hate the sin and love the sinner means we must judge the sinner fairly and
condemn sin when we see it. To not condemn the sin and to judge it is to
hate the sinner. Surely then the more sin we see in a person the better.
Why? If hating the sin is another way of loving the sinner as the Church
says, then the more you see a person as a sinner the more you love them.
Even if you mistakenly think they are worse than they are that is brilliant.
That the Church does not draw this conclusion is proof that it knows fine
well that to hate the sin is to want to maliciously hurt the sinner.
Only a saint could really love the sinner and hate the sin if it is
possible. The Christians claim to be sinners. We are therefore justified in
disbelieving them when they say they love the homosexual and hate his sinful
homosexuality. Take them at their word just for the sake of argument. What
if Christians who loathe homosexuality beat him up to a pulp? Then they must
love the attackers of the young man. They must be more evil in their eyes
than the victim. They are in worse danger than he is for he didn’t sin in
being attacked and they did and all sin deserves everlasting punishment in
Hell. So the attackers are to be loved more than the victim. Also, their
condemnation of the attack has more to do with the theological opinion that
Jesus has done away with God’s laws that homosexuals who practice must be
put to death by stoning than any abhorrence for the suffering caused to the
victim. The love of Christianity for the victim is unimpressive.
The idea of a forgiving God is not consoling at all. If God forgives he will not forgive you unless you forgive everybody else too first which is only decency and commonsense and scriptural too (Mark 11:25,26; Matthew 6:12). But can you forgive Hitler? You can only pretend you can. Subconsciously, if you experienced his evil and your family did you wouldn’t forgive. If to refuse to forgive means that God refuses you pardon, then to sin after or to not forgive means you are ungrateful for this pardon you have received from him and are trying to reverse it all which is a very serious sin indeed. Then nobody can be saved. To deny this would be to become a self-deluding hypocrite.
The failure of love the sinner and hate the sin proves that it is vindictive to
believe in a God of justice who rewards people according to their works be they
good or bad.
To ask one to hate sin is to ask one to hate sinners. To also ask one to love
sinners is asking one to pretend to love. The Church boasts that it can love the
sinner and hate the sin. It is a lying boast and the Church even goes as far as to
say that it is an extreme sin to doubt that loving sinners and hating sin is
possible. Its doctrine is based on self-righteous pride. The Church hates and
maligns those who see the deceit of loving sinners and hating sin. To say that
John does bad, whether he is deliberately bad or not, is to say that if bad is
hateful then John is hateful. If bad is not hateful then why counsel to hate
sin? A faith that hates those who see its hypocrisy does not really love sinners
and hate sins.
The Handbook of Christian Apologetics states that it is true that we cannot
avoid being Pharisees (self-righteous hypocrites) when we go on about right and
wrong and cannot hate sins without hating the sinners (page 127).
Christian teaching says that we must hate sin so much that we would rather have
an eye gouged out than sin with it. Jesus said that a man who looks at a woman
with lust commits adultery in his heart and he said that if your eye causes you
to sin it is better if you gouge it out (Matthew 5). He said this to indicate
the abhorrence that he considers to be due to even a harmless sin of lust.
The Handbook says that that to hate evil is to give in to evil and become evil
and negative. This contradicts the Christian teaching that hating sin is a good
thing. The reason the handbook says this is that hating evil can make us hard
and cruel just like hating a sinner can. This is of course correct.
But it still tells us to hate the sin. What is it's answer?
The Handbook says that Christ miraculously separates the sin from the sinner so
that you can love the sinner and hate the sin. This is totally insane. You don't
hate sin like you hate burnt custard, you hate it with a bad person to person
feeling. Even Christ can't change that!
You can only love the sinner and hate the sin by a miracle. You would know from
this miracle that there is a God. So why does he not do other miracles before us
when he does that one? Why does he hide so much? Because there is no miracle.
Miracles should not be hauled in to solve religious contradictions for once that
starts there is nothing that can be done to find out even if one religion is
more believable than another.
The Handbook shows that if you want to believe that you can love the sinner and
hate the sin, you have to pretend that only God can enable you to do so. You
know you certainly cannot do it yourself. Belief in God only gives you a pretend
morality. It also urges you to silence as threats to morality, those who oppose
this pretending or who expose it. It promotes the power seeking activities of
religion. The believers act as if they need God to bolster the claims of a
counterfeit morality. In that case they should say that they need God not for
maintaining morality but for backing up a caricature of it laden with hypocrisy.
The believers say that loving the sinner and hating their sins is impossible
without his help. To say that God miraculously enables you to love the sinner as
you hate sin is to say that religious faith must come before everything for we
need faith in God to be able to love sinners. You may suspect that God may help
the atheist to love evil people and hate their immorality - but the atheist will
not know it is impossible without a miracle. He will think it is natural. But
surely God cannot do this without the atheist's informed consent? Hence the need
for faith.
We do not love persons but our perception of them. We love them not as they are
but the way we see them. This is a fact of life. To love the sinner then would
mean that we have to perceive them as good to love them. But then we cannot hate
the sin so we have to forget the sin. The commandment actually suggests there is
no such thing as right and wrong and its opposition to sin is just another dose
of spiritual schizophrenia or hypocrisy or both. All it can do is encourage
cruelty and hatred and power-grabbing and lying. When it is your perception of
the person that you love not the real person then it is your perception of their
acts as sins that you hate. You choose if you have free will to perceive that
sins have occurred and they will not be happy about that or feel loved for that
is like deciding to select the worst interpretation of their actions.
What could be more ridiculous and two-faced than holding that homosexuality is
objectively disordered or sick but this is not holding homosexuals to be
disordered as the Vatican does? So a person with the flu is not a sick person
then? The papacy is trying to manipulate homosexuals and sweet-talk them into
the Church. Yet that doctrine is an offshoot of love the sinner and hate the
sin.
Christianity claims to be Catholic - that is, it is the faith for all people. It
follows then that if uneducated people were told to love the sinner and hate the
sin (if correct) it would make sense to them right away. It is a basic teaching.
But it does not make sense to them.
Love the sinner and hate the sin is absolute proof that Christianity is
hypocrisy and lies. This rubbish ultimately comes from the priests so they are
the ringleaders.