LOVE THE SINNER AND HATE THE SIN - ITS SLOW POISON, IT'S ARSENIC
The Christian argument that we must be like God and love the sinner and hate the sin has a hollowness about it. It is in fact choosing to do slow-burning harm to the other as opposed to be too obviously dangerous by lashing out. That hides what it truly is.
Actions speak louder than words one way but another way
they do not. Words are actions. People who hate you usually prefer others to
hurt you for them. So hate speech or sweetened up slow poison is their way of
getting somebody to hurt you. They are nevertheless trying to do you harm
but through someone else.
To hate is to wish harm on.
To love is to wish for somebody's wellbeing.
Yet religion says we can love the person and hate their
sin.
It says you can love yourself and hate your sin. But can
you? You know that your fears and jealousies and pridefulness etc are part of
you as much as your hands and feet are. These things are what you make into sin.
Thus sin is you and you are sin when you sin.
The husband who beats his wife to a pulp because of her
adultery will say it happened because he loves her. He will even believe that.
The doctrine of love the sinner hates the sin trains him to manipulate his wife
to get her to believe he loves her. What about the man who beats his wife just
because the dinner was cold?
We judge if somebody hates you by what they may say or
think of you. If somebody says with emotion that you are a very bad person we
justly conclude that the person hates you.
The love sinner and hate sin idea tries to make it
impossible to tell if anybody hates you. If you could love the sinner and hate
the sin there would be no way to tell and to accuse anybody of hating would be
vindictive.
We can do evil while thinking it is good and intending it
to be good. The signs that a person hates you then could be misleading.
Society and religion teach, "You love a person morally or
immorally." Moral love is a tough love that corrects the other person. Immoral
love would be like rewarding a person for robbing a bank with a nice dinner. It
would be helping them to feel good about harming others seriously. If you feel
that hating sin too easily leads to hating the sinner you will tend to err on
the side of caution and be soft on evil people. It is a fact that if you are
good at loving sinners and hating sins, that skill will be useless if the
sinners start doing grave evils.
Christians are to love God for being what he is and not
what they think he should be. God by definition is the being who knows best and
does best. Loving sinners is supposed to be about loving them for what they are
and not for what you think they should be. In other words you ignore the sin and
even tell yourself that there is no sin in them at all! This is contradicted
then by your calling them sinners and calling them opponents of holiness and the
law of God and the perfect love of God. So you love them for the perfect people
they are. If you partly hate the sinner and claim to mostly love them then you
do not love them at all. You fail to love the persons for what they are and not
for what you think they should be. Love the sinner and hate the sin only
impresses those who do not really understand love. Those who preach the
principle are propagating saccharinised evil.
The world is full of people who engage in immoral love
while thinking they love the sinner and hate the sin.
Surely the more a person is brainwashed about love the
sinner and hate the sin the more they can develop Stockholm Syndrome?
If you hate and cannot see it, the hate is far more
dangerous. It simmers away undisturbed. At least if it is out in the open you
can do something about it.
If you are blind to the hate you have for others who do
wrong, you will soon become blind to the hate you have for yourself. Not seeing
your own hate for yourself is very dangerous. Hating yourself means you cannot
see yourself as valuable and thus you will hate others as you will see them as
dangerous. You will fear them not valuing you and hurting you.
Guilt and shame may be linked but they are not the same
thing. John hits Mike. John feels guilty because he hit Mike. John feels ashamed
because he hit Mike. Guilt is about the action. Shame is about others, including
Mike knowing what you have done. If John believes in loving the sinner and
hating the sin some problems arise. What about his own sin? If he loves himself
and hates his sin how can he let himself feel guilty? How can he punish himself
with guilt? Love the sinner and hating the sin puts people in denial where their
own guilt is concerned. It leads only to moral destruction. Shame is
hypocritical in the sense that nobody feels it until they are caught out. It is
not the wrongdoing they are worried about but what others think of it. Shame is
proof that we are more worried about fitting in with society than about really
being good. We value being thought good more than being good.
Some who say you should love the sinner and hate the sin
mean only that you may not exercise violence against the sinner or ostracise her
or him. But there is more to hate than these things. The most poisonous form of
hate is more subtle and crafty. The craftier forms are more popular for they
make it possible to seduce others while avoiding the perils of looking bad and
dangerous. Then as hate feeds on hate, the day will come when they attack the
sinners and you will tell yourself it is their responsibility and not yours.
Clever eh?
Suppose Satan needed medicine to live. If Jesus cares about his wellbeing and not his sins or how dangerous he is he will give him the medicine. If Jesus is afraid to help him for he will recover and do terrible harm to others he might refrain for their sake. That would mean that anybody loving you and hating your sins is not necessarily going to help you or work for your wellbeing. So it is odd why people take consolation from the love the sinner and hate the sin doctrine. The love is not about the other person's wellbeing at all but about them. The person who says they forgive X though he has ate babies alive because they want to be free from bitterness and ill-feeling are doing it for themselves not X. They do not really accept X though they may act nice towards him. That is an example of loving the sinner and hating the sin - it is not really loving. The sinner is used as a means of making yourself feel you love him and getting a nice warm smug glow when you do not in fact love him at all. Such blindness will only get worse.
You don't need to love your enemy, just don't
retaliate. So why did Jesus say love? Are you using what the enemy
did in order to work up love for the enemy in yourself? Why? Is it a
sort of reward? It is self-aggrandizement. There is no real love if
that is all you are after. The love won't last when the enemy puts
enough pressure on you. If Jesus knew what he was doing here, he
worked out a good way of driving people apart while seeming not to.
The person is his or her actions. To hate the action is
to hate a person and to do it in a way that degrades them but which spares you
the suffering and pollution that comes from raging hate. In other words, you
know hate can be bad for you so you find a way to hate that isn't so bad or you
flavour the hate with sugar.
We are not primarily moral beings. If your beloved sister or brother goes to jail for murder or drug dealing, you may want them back and not even feel mad at them or what they have done. This love will render you unable to see that if you try to get them off you belittle their victims and hurt them. You are in opposition to the victims and their families. Love can blind us to what we are. It is no surprise that hate is given a new form when you claim to love those who make themselves despicable.
The doctrine is just about going into denial about how capable of hate you are.
