Love the sinner and hate the sin
Philosophies that say we must love the sinner but not love their sin and even
that we must hate it or dislike it are making an impossible distinction between
a sinner and the sin. Sin or evil is not what a person does. It is what a person
is. You cannot divorce sin or evil from the sinner or evil person who does them.
To say you can is as hypocritical as saying cancer is a sickness but cancer
patients are not sick. Can you say blindness is a disorder but that if your eye
is blind your eye is not disordered?
People say you can disapprove of somebody's actions without judging the person.
But to disapprove is to call them dangerous as people in some way. It is to
judge them. It is seeing people as dangerous that is the problem for that
implies you should be ready to hurt them in order to make them think about
stopping it or in defence.
Love the sinner and hate the sin seeks to glorify sinners while hypocritically
calling them sinners. It seeks to glorify the sinner and condemn the person who
judges the sinner. Whoever condemns you for condemning another though you are
doing it justly hates you and is exercising malevolent hypocrisy towards you. If
John murders and you know he is guilty, what would you think of a person who
condemned you for knowing it? They claim to love him but they do not love you!
Whose side are they really on?
If people promote errors and rubbish, they are dangerous to the truth. They are
a threat. To see them as a threat is to judge them.
You can be bad without meaning to be bad. A woman who murders her baby to make
sure it goes to Heaven instead of living to maybe end up in Hell forever doesn't
mean to be bad (in theory - but in reality we do not accept that somebody doing
grave evil means well for their inability to see evil for what it is makes them
evil). But she is bad. She is worse than the person who knows what they are
doing for there is more hope of enlightening the person who sees the evil he or
she does for what it is than the person who cannot or who is in denial. Judging
her as recklessly bad means that in principle you would see her hurt to stop her
hurting. You become a threat to the threat in principle.
To say that a person is to be loved and is perfect and their sin is to be
despised is to pretend the sinner does not commit the sin at all. If I sin and
the sin has nothing to do with me, then how can I be accountable for the good I
do either? Hating sin and loving sinner implies ingratitude and fake gratitude
towards those who do good. It directs invisible forces to them that discourage
them from doing good. Your subconscious will see and know all this even if you
think you don't consciously know it.
To separate sin from the sinner or to separate wrongdoing from the wrongdoer is
to oppose what cannot be separated from the person. It is to oppose and despise
what is not real apart from the person. So it is annoying yourself over nothing!
It is a declaration of self-hatred and soon it will erupt into hatred against
the wrongdoer. If you hate yourself you will not treat others well. Indeed by
giving yourself to another when you have a bad opinion of yourself is really
trying to inflict yourself on them. Self-esteem is necessary for genuine warm
goodness.
How can we encourage people to change the hurtful things in their lives without
blaming them? The answer is simple. They are not responsible for the past or the
present for they cannot change them. They can only change the future. This
teaching is not about loving the sinner and hating the sin. It repudiates it.
Love the sinner and hate the sin is evil and is hypocrisy.
Don't call anybody a bad person. It is not that simple. And everybody no matter
how hard they try to be bad, is more good than bad. If you call somebody bad and
they are, then you can no longer say it is abusive to call them a bastard or
scum or monster for it is true! Believers in free will say there is a lot of good
in bad people. They mean they freely do good things as well as bad things. This
does not help for every bad person needs friends to some degree to succeed in
being bad. The correct view is that nobody really knows how responsible anybody
is for what they do. Feeling in control of what you do does not mean you are
fully in control of it. There may be parts of your brain at work that partly
force you.
Love the evil or the sin by seeing the good it could have been and encourage it
to rise to better good. We are not saying you must treat the murderer like a
saint. We are saying you treat the murderer with as much love as is possible and
to offer healing. You look at the good that many have termed evil and you make
it shine brighter and better. The so-called evil is just drawn and shaped to
become wonderful.
See no evil. What if a person commits a crime such a murder? Then think about
what they did but not as an evil. See it as a blot on their brilliance that
needs to be removed to make them shine brighter! Deal with it to help them.
There is nothing wrong with looking at the good in them not the bad for you have
to look at something anyway.
Do not judge your feelings of anger and outrage and hate. Judging them only
makes it worse. Step back and observe them and let them pass by. Realise that
they are flowing through you but they are not you. This is reminding yourself
that you are in control and not they.
Religion says that sin leads to unhappiness. Others have said that it is the
belief you have sinned that does this. Neither lead to unhappiness. It is how
you are programmed that determines your emotional response to sin or belief in
sin.
Love the wrongdoer and love what they did so that you may escort it to a throne
and a higher place and put a crown on its head as a reward. Let the lead be
turned into glittering precious gold.