Can't See Hate if you believe People do Love Sinners and Hate the Sins

 

Love the sinner and hate the sin is a religious thing.  Why do we hear it all the time and never, "Love the wrongdoer but hate the action that hurts them or others"?  Something needs investigation here.  It looks like a religious refusal to admit to hating sinful people.

 

Even the majority of religious people would hold that it is not possible to properly want somebody to have wellbeing while having insufficient respect for their belief system (be it atheist or religious), their culture or their choices.  [That is not to say that some systems deserve much respect!]  We must remember that nobody really sees a sinner as just a sinner.  You are seen as a person that is a problem or a problem that is a person.

 

There is another way that nobody sees a sinner as just a sinner.  The homosexual sinner is seen as part of people who are like her or him.  So when somebody talks about hating sins they mean group sins.  It is never really individual - get that?  Nobody really believes somebody who claims to "Love those sinners and hate their sins."  It is groups and group think that we fear.  Those who keep talking in individual terms are clearly lying and hiding something.

 

Hating the choices of others is clearly the thing which implies the most hate for them.  It cannot be anything but personal.

 

Hating their culture next and it implies hating a person as part of a sort of group so it is really the group that is implicitly hated.  That is personal too.

 

Hating their belief system is only hating them for what they believe as if they can control what they believe.  Instead of doing that we should be helping them rethink and providing them with resources to make up their own minds.  Religions accuse critics of their beliefs of hate and thus they want to conflate any challenge of religious doctrine as being an attack on the person who accepts the doctrine.  Religion thus argues that, "Your beliefs are not you.  I challenge your arguments and beliefs.  I attack them not you" is false and thus is inviting you to hate the believer you challenge.  It programs that believer to feel hated.  Religion does not believe then that one can hate the religious belief and love the believer and it expects us to believe it loves sinners and hates sins!  Ironic!

 

Love the sinner and hate the sin claims that the person matters to us more than the act. If this sounds like a self-righteous boast that is because it is. If I stole a cup or a tiny amount of money from colleagues they will detest that act. They will not be saying, “It's only a cup.” They will be saying, “It’s an insult to us how he let us down and cannot be trusted. We trusted him and we are let down.” You will hate cancer like it is an abomination. If cancer is nobody’s fault and not even God’s you will hate it is as it is. You will personalise it and hate it as an enemy. Religion wants you to personalise and hate sin.  The hate will torment you and you will blame the sinner for provoking it or making it necessary.  Love the sinner and hate the sin is a lie for it pretends to be not personal when it is.

 

If the believers divide you into soul, the "real" you and body, then clearly they are compartmentalising.  People who hate you but who have to be nice to you do that all the time.  It is like, "I like you when I have to be in your company but in reality I hate you."  That is why you can have a charming enemy who hates your guts at the same time. 

 

Another way to compartmentalise is to see the person as lovable as in being a child of God but otherwise despicable.  The person is still seen as a walking sin.

 

Compartmentalising is only about believers trying to look good in their own estimation and that of others.

 

"I love you, and I don’t want to see you get hurt" is not in any way like love the sinner and hate the sin for a sin is bad not because it hurts but because it assaults the dignity of God.  It is God's being "hurt" that the believer has to worry about.  Love the sinner and hate the sin is off-putting in secular world.  Religion presumes that sin hurts in all sorts of mystical ways.  For religion there is more to evil than corrupting yourself and inflicting something on somebody else.  Evil is seen as a power that is full of all sorts of bad supernatural mysteries.

 

"Love the sinner and hate the sin" is what you are told not "Love unconditionally."  Why not?  Clearly there is a threat: "I will love you correctly or unconditionally if you give up such and such a choice."  It is using love to control and that is not love.  It disempowers the victim by confusing her or him.  It is like "I am looking at you but mostly I see your sin."

 

Does "I love Jerry but hate the rapist paedophile in him that would mean he would target my child" ring true?  It absolutely totally does not.  We would question the sanity or integrity of the people who would say that.  It is worse if it becomes, "We love Jerry but hate the rapist paedophile in him that would mean he would target our child".  Why?  It is people all convincing one another of the impossible.  Each person speaking for the others is not on.  What right has person x to say his friends love sinners and hate sins too when they say the line between this love and hate of the person is very thin?

 

"Love the maths student but hate his mistake" is definitely personal for why are we saying hate? Why not just correct?

 

When you criticise a country for cutting the hands off thieves they tell you, "Unlike you who punish criminals, we punish crimes."  Is loving the sinner and hating the sin really a safeguard of any kind?  It is nonsense.  Hating the criminals and jailing them would mean they are punished and they still have their hands.

 

We do not know most people and do not care much if at all what happens to them.  Yet if some stranger hurts us or our loved ones that person becomes so important that we end up trying to forgive.  Why don't we give them the same lack of concern as we give others?  Making them important so that you can hate and then forgive them sounds more like passive aggressive hate that is in denial than any kind of love. As you need to care about a person enough to be able to hate them the risk of raging hate is very great.  Is the forgiveness trying to take a step to that?

 

It is better to see the bad side you have as part of you as a character than to pretend you don’t have it for that is effectively denying what you are and denying your character. Other people need to respect you as a character as well. Religion works against that. It only leads to you being dehumanised by the love the sinner hate the sin brigade.  Dehumanising love is not love at all and as bad as hate.  Religion cannot object to hate when it offers you that!

 

The reason that the philosophy of "love the sinner and hate the sin" is so popular and manages to protect the public image of religions like Catholicism and Islam is because it makes hatred for the person manifest as passive aggression. The passive aggressive person often does good in order to look good and to disempower his or her victim. The hate is there though it may be latent. It is internalised and made part of you as much as obvious mad hate is.  In a sense, when it is disguised it is more ingrained and harmful.  Evil that is given the appearance of good becomes part of what you are better than evil that looks more like what it really is.

 

To label another person as a sinner when you are a sinner yourself is to create a sense that you are superior to them and not really a sinner at least any more or that their sins are worse than yours just because they are different from yours.

 

Some believe that God does not literally hate sin but he merely contradicts it. It is incompatible with God and what God wants. They say he is not against sin for any reason than that it hurts us.

It is usually impossible if not always impossible to separate what a person does from what they are. You cannot do this emotionally or psychologically or rationally it is impossible. There are no grades of impossible - impossible is just impossible.  You would not tell a diabetic person that you love them but hate their choice to eat food that harms them.  They would feel degraded by you.  If you told them they were sinning or abusing themselves that degradation would be compounded a million times.  We do not like being moralised at even in the name of love.

With love the sinner and hate the sin why do do people not just take the word love and stop there? To say you do not judge say gays implies you in fact do judge them for you are saying they should be judged but you do not judge them. Or you could be trying to convince yourself that you do not judge them when in fact you do. You do not judge somebody for buying a white car and you do not say, “I do not judge them.”  Your saying that suggests that you do judge them!!  Why should our sinner feel warmed and charmed by a liar like you?  It is not them you love but yourself so you could be a danger to them especially when you see them as sinners.

 

Love the sinner and hate the sin contradicts the Christian doctrine that we do not do wrong by the sin but in the sin. By the sin would imply that it is the act that matters not what it makes me. In the sin is about what the sin reveals about me - it reveals that I am not all-good. I have internalised evil and made myself evil.

 

What love the sinner while hating their sin does in practice is this.  You pick out say LGBT and a religious group usually Protestants and mean only those when you say you love them and hate their sins. This is a form of psychological transference. You hide your hate and make it look good by pretending it is something other than hate. You even pretend it is love. "Love the sinner and hate the sin" is insincere when you cherry pick what group you are going to apply it to. If you say it about those who kill those of a different race and not of those who kill your own it is clear that you really hate the other race. You are a racist. It is an excuse for marginalising others while getting the rewards of being thought of a nice good person. It is creating marginalisation and also entrenching it. Sin is a thing. Sinner is being. Or sin is a thing and sinner is a person. Loving the sinner and hating the sin means the real target is the person.

 

Nobody but the superficial and the hypocrites pretend that loving the sinner and hating the sin is easy or that it is meant to be. They certainly do not love sinners and hate sins if they find it easy!   Their gaslighting allows them to avoid taking responsibility for the damage they lead others to do.

No Copyright