Love Sinner Morally?? Does your attitude, which must be helpful and beneficial, to the sinner matter not your feeling?
 

Sin is a violation of the moral law of God. Sin is what is not allowed by God. It is not to be tolerated.

Religion insists that morality has a foundation and its foundation is, Love the Sinner and Hate the Sin. So you are immoral if you hate the sinner even a little or if you love the sin even a little. You are even more immoral if you ignore or reject the foundation.

A sinner is a person who is personally opposed to the moral law as laid down by God. Only a person who believes in God can be a sinner as far as motive goes. But just as you can commit a crime while meaning well - eg stealing the purse to buy medicine to save your baby's life - so you can commit sin while meaning well. Sin is against the criminal law of God too. You are a criminal if you sin.

Morality is not a simple belief in good or bad but a belief in being good or else suffering punishment. Morality and deserving go together. A person who does not punish the wicked though good is not morally good. Moral is about law - a form of law but not necessarily like the state law. If you do not "make" others pay for breaking the moral law then you repudiate the moral law. A law without a price is not a law at all. In reality you do not make others pay for breaking the moral law but you unleash the consequences of their evil actions on them. You let them have the bad things they are responsible for bringing on themselves.
 
Good is whatever promotes wellbeing and doesn't care what a person asks for or deserves be it good or bad for it gives them only good.
 
Being moral and being good are not the same thing.
 
Love the sinner morally then means wish evil on them because it is saying they are sinners and that is to call retribution on them. Retribution is not always possible so that to you will be something to be regretted.
 
To love a sinner is to see him as a sinner and to judge him as one. Judge means you form a view of what good or evil they deserve. Judging is repulsive to today's society which urges people not to judge as it wants permissiveness to prevail. Society punishes the person who exacts just retribution or who calls for it. The person who worries instead about how to hurt criminals to deter them and others and to hopefully reform them is praised! What the criminal has earned by his crime does not matter so much as what to do to stop harm happening. It is unjust to hurt a criminal when all you are worried about is stopping him from hurting others. It means that it can't be that bad if you crucify an innocent man as a criminal as long as it puts others off crime.
 
Religion often says, "You have to judge a person as being bad and good or one or the other. Otherwise you only love a picture of them you have in your head. You need to look at them and let yourself see the warts as well as everything else." If religion is right, then if you refuse to judge sinners then you are judging good and evil people the same and that is disrespecting the good.
 
To call a person a sinner is to call judgement on them. Stupid people are not offended at being categorised as sinful! People may be desensitised through the manipulations exercised by religion. But all who are judged should fear and be offended.
 
If you ban harming others by law, by moral or civil law, you are declaring that the law is more important than the harm. The law does not stop harm happening but deals with the person when it has already been done. The harm cannot be undone. People who do no harm because they fear the penalty of the law are only outwardly harmless and the law has not made them better people. So the law is more important than preventing harm. If somebody is hurt the main concern is the law. Some caring people might say it is the only concern! The law worries about the rule being broken not the harm done. It is as cold as a dentist pulling a tooth for he will be in trouble if he does not.
 
The law is about the harm it can do in return for breaking the rule. A law without a penalty for breaking it is not a law so the law is about the penalty rather than the rule.
 
The law does not get its authority from condemning harm. There are laws that punish harmless deeds. The law whether concerned with harm or not will threaten harm on those who break it. The law is about itself. It is about law. It is not about your safety. It cannot even know if it will succeed in doing more good than bad.
 
The moral law then is vindictive.
 
Criminal law is more vindictive.
 
And divine law is far more vindictive than criminal law. Whatever excuse you have for revering moral law or criminal law, you are certainly going out of your way to be vindictive when you say sin exists or that a God who condemns sin exists. Now you know why you don't believe people who claim to love you but who admonish your waywardness or your sinful ways! You know all this! When they tell you they do it for God your anger gets worse!
 
Believers worry how people can take the idea of the moral law seriously if there is no God. They say that unless there is a God, then morality is just a matter of opinion. They say nobody can say it is a fact that abortion is wrong. They can only say it is an opinion. But even if there is a God and morality is objective facts, it does not follow that we know what those facts are. Perhaps we are so distant from God that our morals are really opinions and we cannot see the principles of objective morality. Even if there is a God and morality is objectively grounded in him, we still end up deciding if we will accept x as objectively moral or y as objectively immoral. So we are still stuck with our opinions about morality. It is still about us and not God. We only endorse God's objective morals if we decide he is right so it is us that is deciding what is right and wrong not him. It is hypocrisy then to argue that we believe in God for he gives us objective moral values that we cannot accept if there is no God. That would be a vindictive reason to believe in God. Imagine saying, "God is right to allow people to suffer. He has a good reason", while your faith in his existence is fuelled by such a horrible motive.
 
Also, grounding objective morality in God does not help us in real life. In reality we follow our employer's views about the best and worst ways to do the work. We follow the views of the state about what is criminal and when and what is not and what the proper treatment of law breakers should be. In one country, the woman guilty of killing her baby gets a fine. In another she goes to jail for a year. In another she goes for up to fourteen years. We follow our community's prejudices about right and wrong to a large degree. Usually it is considered wrong to report a greedy person who works and who pretends to be unemployed to get benefits from the state. Or to admonish people who won't marry but prefer to live together as they don't believe in long-term commitment. We follow rules that differ from country to country and that differ from the rules our forefathers kept. We follow the moral mores invented by people we look up to.
 
We conclude that calling people sinners is not intended to help them. And it cannot! It is vindictive and hypocritical.



SEARCH EXCATHOLIC.NET

No Copyright