To love everybody is to love nobody

Love means rewarding people for their good potential and what they would or could or might do.  A definition that says love is what is good for the other is amounts roughly to the same idea. You need to know enough about a person to really love them.

If you believe you have free will so that you might love everybody then remember that you cannot love everybody.  You are indifferent towards nearly everybody on earth and indifference is worse than hate and the true opposite of love.  If free will is about telling yourself that you are to love everybody then it is a bad joke and will only wreck your self-regard.  If you do not love most others and think you should then you will inevitably but perhaps secretly end up being very bad.

In the chapter Love and Hate in The Satanic Bible Anton Szandor LaVey says that you cannot love everybody and it is crazy to think you can. He says trying to love everybody will make you a bad judge of character. He says that you cannot fully love unless you hate. The main point he made was that if you love everybody those who deserve your love the most will suffer because you cannot have the energy to love them all.  That we can’t love everybody is not the point. The point is we are happy with this.  We don’t want to love everybody.  Creatures like that will hate easily. 

What I have to say to this is: the Church says that to love others is not necessarily to like them. That is just a cop-out for if you don’t like people you will find it harder to help them and they will suffer. So you have to make yourself like them in order to love them and people want love to be a warm thing. Nobody likes cold love. Liking a person is the best way to help them for it helps them like themselves. It is good for them. Moreover, you would not be loving yourself by putting yourself through the pain of helping them when you could help people you like and if you don’t love number one you love nobody and are just play-acting if you act as if you do. Random accidents that kill happen and you would rather see somebody you dislike being killed than somebody you like when it has to be one or the other. The Church gives you more reasons to dislike people for religion is something surplus to fight over so the Church is abetting many wrongs. You can fully love without ever having hated – young children do it all the time.

Humanists believe that we can love and like everybody and indeed should simply because human evil is not a justification for hatred but for pity for it is a disorder and not a free act. We are convinced that to command belief in free will is to command hatred. God certainly teaches that free will exists which means he must be joking when he says he wants us to be good for he couldn’t possibly mind if we hate one another’s guts. The same thing is true of anybody who tells you that we all have free will. If they want credibility as people who want to improve the world they have to become missionaries of determinism.

Love the sinner and hate the sin says you must say the sinner is wholly good and lovable and the sin is bad.  If that is true what are they called a sinner for?  To be a sinner means that sin is not just an action but do with the kind of person you are.  Thus loving the sinner and hating the sin is contradictory.

The notion of loving the sinner and hating the sin tells you to love everyone.  But if you do that then your love and praise become useless and meaningless and end up doing nobody any good.  Unless I am selective about who I love and who I praise, my love and praise are meaningless.   If I feel I love and praise everybody then I don't really feel that way about anybody.

The love sinner and hate sin commandment is based on mistrust of people.  It is used by those who wish to condition people to imagine that they can love the sinner and hate the sin.  It doesn't trust these people to let them have the truth.  It is not based on charity for the innocent but on mistrust of the innocent.  It is not motivated by love.  Whoever will not let you see through a doctrine is not your friend.

Loving people for being people as if their behaviours do not happen is really loving nobody.  It is said that if you love everybody you really love nobody.  Nobody is special because if you are that liberal with your love you only dilute it for each person so much that it is almost water and not love.  It is hard to believe in the sincerity of a person who claims to love the Holy Virgin Mary and Satan himself equally.  Practically speaking you may as well not love.  But if you start seeing love as being about the person as divorced from the kind of person they are as shown by their actions and behaviours then you are making the problem a million times worse.  You are an extremist when it comes to the fact that if you love everybody you really love nobody.  A person who says they love everybody must love nobody because seeing people as persons divorced from the kind of persons they are is really loving nobody. 

Those who say you must love the sinner and hate the sin say the reason is that you yourself are a sinner and you cannot say another should be vilified and condemned when you deserve the same treatment.  This implies that if there is a choice you must vilify and condemn yourself rather than the other person.  It implies that all sinners are to be judged as bad as each other - this is unfair and obviously foolish.  A person with 2 sins would have more right to hurt a sinner for sinning if the other sinner has 3 or more sins.  Nobody should be believed if they claim to love sinners if they malign and tar all sinners with the one brush.  To love all sinners is to love nobody.