DOES FORGIVING ALLOW YOU TO HATE SIN AND LOVE SINNER?

 
The love sinner and hate sin advice advocates begrudging love.  It advocates it even more when it presents itself as a command.

 

If the advice is nonsense then the command is even worse.  Advising nonsense is nothing compared to commanding it.  If it is difficult to be inspired by nonsense then commanding it makes it worse.  The lesson is, "I command you to love the sinner and hate the sin" is virtually telling you to hate the sinner in a roundabout way.  The command is fundamentally what God in Christianity is about.  Islam does not teach the doctrine and it is absent from the Qur'an.
 
Religion claims you must forgive and love the sinner but hate the sin.


It calls itself good because of that teaching. But it is aware that some people have to feel a murderous hatred for the evil person before they can start moving on. That takes the sheen off. That shows the hypocrisy.


The New Testament rejects the doctrine of Aristotle that if you are bad then just practice being virtuous even if you are not and you will become virtuous for that presupposes you have an inherent virtue in you. It is clear that in Christianity we are sinners not just people who commit sins.  We need the miracle of God's forgiveness to stop us being worse than what we are.  Forgiveness really deals with the inherent badness as only a miracle can.  It fixes us and does for us what we cannot do for ourselves.  Grace it is called as well.  For that reason Christian forgiveness from God means God forgives who we are not just what we do. Or more correctly he forgives who we are and the result is the sin is forgiven.  With a doctrine like that, you can be sure that those who say they love people and partition off their sins to hate the sins are lying. If you cannot judge sins you know the person sins so saying you do not judge is only virtue signalling.  Judging specific sins is not the point.  You are still labelling the person as a sinner.  When people are only worried about being challenged on certain sins and not about being challenged as a sinner in general they obviously love what they see as their sins, those particular sins.

 

Some people seem to think that they can be like God and forgive what people are and then expect a surprising change, a miracle!  The arrogance!

Sin is seen as being very bad and hateful and worthy of guilt.  If you are inherently bad then sin is very fearful indeed for it is your intrinsic evil at work.  Religion seeks to lay a severe burden of guilt on the sinner. This is vicious - it is changing your life that matters not how guilty you feel. Roman Catholicism accuses people who masturbate of grave sin. It is gravely evil of the Church to spout such hurtful nonsense. That the Church offers confession to relieve the guilt is no excuse. What would you think of a doctor who poisons the drinking water even if he is ready to give victims some stomach medicine?
 
Loving the sinner may mean forgiving the sinner. Hating the sin would mean you don't forgive the sin. Loving the sinner and hating the sin is therefore a contradiction and a dose of hypocrisy. If the sin and the sinner are separate, then you forgive sins not sinners.
 
Suppose you really can separate your love for the sinner from your hatred for the sin. If you have been hurt or betrayed very badly you will find it nearly impossible to hate the sin and not the sinner. If you deny how hurt you are, you may be able to give out fake forgiveness.  But that only a cosmetic answer – not a real one!
 
The teaching that we love and forgive others in spite of their sins implies this love is grudging. How real is love like that? It will eat at you for years and make you even worse than a few months of honestly hating the person would.
 
To say a person is the sin - that is what you mean when you call a person a sinner - and then to deny it in order to love the person is giving that person begrudging love and therefore begrudging forgiveness.
 
Love sinner and hate sin becomes a problem only if somebody sins. It is clear then that forgiveness must be needed. You forgive people not sins or wrongs. How can you do that if you see the sin as having nothing to do with the sinner?
 
Marcus Aurelius said that we must expect to meet harmful people so to keep ourselves from being poisoned by their ways and corrupted, and so that we will value them properly, we must be prepared for them and forgive them in advance - before they do anything! That way we value them and keep our inner peace. If he is right, he certainly shows that if we forgive all people for what they have done in the past we view everybody we meet as somebody who we have not forgiven in advance. Our alleged love of them is suspect.

 

Plus forgiving anybody and everybody is cheap.  In a real sense, to forgive all is to forgive none.
 
If sin and sinner separate then forgiveness is unimportant
 
If you love the sinner and hate the sin and they are separate then it follows that you can forgive the sinner but continue hating the sin. Indeed you should do this. You can forgive the sinner but not forgive the sin. Christians will say that the more you love the person the more you will hate their sins that they commit now and the sins that they have committed in the past and even those they have been forgiven. So you love those sinners by hating their sins even if those sinners are forgiven.
 
Forgiving the sin means that you are wiping the slate clean and relegating the sin to the past. It is in the past and not to be treated as existent any more. It is not loving the sinner and hating the sin. You can't put the sin in the past and go on hating it. It is persons you forgive not sins. Strictly speaking that is the case.
 
Selfish
 
It is easy to forgive wrongs done to other people rather than to yourself. It’s selfish for that reason and the Church and every other religion says selfishness is wrong. It’s an act of violence against the wronged person even if they cannot see it. That is why if you forgive the man who has beaten your sister to death you really don’t care about her. Or him either if he is degrading and harming himself by beating her.
 
If you care about a person you will hate to lose her and you will be angry with him for he took her away. If you want to let things go and still care about her you have to adopt the Atheist solution of denying free will.
 
If it is bad to forgive what is done to others when you don't really and cannot understand what it was really like for them you are using their pain to boost your sanctimony. To bring God into it only pressures people to forgive what was done to others. God makes the selfishness worse.

 

You may say you can only forgive wrongs that are done to you.  But the fact remains that if you are not bothered by how Jack molested Jane as a child then maybe you do not care?  You certainly have exercised one ingredient of forgiveness - moving on.  If it is not forgiveness it is not far off it.

CONCLUSION
 
The doctrines of God, sin and forgiveness of sins have absurd implications. The intelligent cannot be said to take them seriously. It is easy for religion to make people feel they cannot love the sinner and hate the sin. They might take religion seriously on sin but not on loving the sinner. Thus they could end up hating the sinner.

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