THE CHRISTIAN DELUSION OF LOVING THE SINNER AND HATING THE SIN

 

When we think of somebody doing evil, we don't think of their motives such as revenge or profit so much as that they simply gave into an urge or prompt to do harm and destroy.  Though there is more to evil than what you can get out of it, people do sense part of it is trying to profit from evil for its own sake.  Doing evil for its own sake and for a purpose are compatible.  How?  You think this useless thing can be contained and wreak wanton abuse and hurt on others so that the "evil for its own sake" bit does not affect you.

 

When we think of somebody doing evil, we don't think of their motives such as revenge or profit so much as that they simply gave into an urge or prompt to do harm and destroy. Though some pretend to think that there there is no more to evil than what you can get out of it, people do sense part of it is trying to profit from evil for its own sake. Doing evil for its own sake and for a purpose are compatible. How? You think this useless thing can be contained and wreak wanton abuse and hurt on others so that the "evil for its own sake" bit does not affect you. The person firing an atomic bomb intends reckless chaos for its own sake but it is put into a framework and that is where you seek to create control around the mess not from the mess that you will use for your goal and advantage.

 

One thing that people mean by love the sinner and hate the sin is, "If you hate the only person you hurt is yourself."  That is rubbish and we only say it for society says it.  We know we are only following a stupid norm and it is not what we really think.  If everybody around you hates you you will be affected even if they do not act on the hate.  And it can be said that real hate is more than a feeling for actions speak more than words or feelings.  So if another hates you they will hurt you.

 

Christian DA Carson writes: “Many Christians use the cliché "Love the sinner, hate the sin." However, we must realize that this is an exhortation to us as imperfect human beings. The difference between us and God in regard to loving and hating is vast. Even as Christians, we remain imperfect in our humanity and cannot love perfectly, nor can we hate perfectly, in other words without malice. But God can do both of these perfectly, because He is God! God can hate without any sinful intent at all. Therefore, He can hate the sin and the sinner in a perfectly holy way and still be willing to lovingly forgive at the moment of that sinner's repentance and faith (Malachi 1:3; Revelation 2:6; 2 Peter 3:9).”

 

So not only is love the sinner hate the sin suspect from the human viewpoint it is also suspect from the religious view!  So if an atheist sees through it the Christian has extra reason to see through it. Those who make careers out of loving sinners are the biggest hypocrites of all.  It is good that Carson admits that Christians have malice towards sinners.  You can be moral without accepting the idea of sin - sin is an attempt to create evil and thus destroy God who never creates evil or lets it be evil.  It is a crime against God. The idea is that evil is not a thing but goodness in the wrong place for God's creation only has good in it.  Thus evil is an attempt to create the destruction of God.  If there is a malice in the non-religious person who sees evildoing not as sin but as evil there must be worse in the person who sees it also as sin.  They are even accused of would be God-murderers.

 

What is harmful and what harm means differs from person to person. All agree though that the most important danger to you is yourself and your unconscious impulses and actions.  Wrongs done to others are wrongs done ultimately to yourself.  So it follows that sin and harm can overlap but are not the same thing.  So you shouldn't even be thinking of the sin.  It is about the harm that the person is doing to themselves. 

Love the sinner and hate the sin treats you as a diagnosis not a person. You are diagnosed as sinner. And then you are cruelly left confused for then you are told that it is about the sin not you. You are not just a sinner. There is more to you than that. When sin is treated as a diagnosis then it hardly makes sense.

What do you do then? Is person-first language the right approach? That would mean not saying John is a sinner or sinful.  You would simply say John has a sin.  That takes away any chance John has for feeling shame and guilt.  He will sin more if he thinks he is going to be excused.

What if the sin is suicide? To say committed suicide is said to suggest a moral or legal law was broken. That is what committing suggests. So you may say the person died by suicide. And you cannot call a suicide attempt failed for not all attempts at suicide are fully intended.  Failed implies they should know to do it right the next time.

 

Avoid pity. You cannot say a person is suffering from their sin or a victim of their sin. You can say they are living with the sin. And pity is not possible if the person chose to sin knowing what they were doing.

 

A person-first approach in relation to sin treats it like a flu and is ridiculous.  It shows that Christians are lying when they say they hate your sin for they love you and it is about you.  And if the hate you feel for sin cannot be helped and hate breeds hate so it should get worse it will be people you will end up not being able to help next.  In practice, hating the sin against your will goes with hating the person who has created and performed the sin.

 

The Conclusive Proof that Christianity is Delusional

The Christians say that we must condemn our sinful acts and those of others. It says to deny this is to take an "anything goes" kind of attitude.

The Church and the Bible say that sin has caused all the evil and suffering in the world at least indirectly. The Church says humanity broke with God when Adam and Eve, the first humans, sinned against God. Adam and Eve made the break for the human race and we keep it up.

The Church sees sin as very serious.

 

It offends such a good God.

 

It is a Pandora's box. Evil is disorder.

 

It deserves everlasting exclusion from enjoyment of an eternal love relationship with God.

 

It does severe damage to the personality.

 

It demands punishment. If you do what is evil you are asking for retribution. If you don't suffer just for doing wrong then that is really saying that the wrong is no big deal. There would be no law.

 

So this all seems pretty horrible. It is as if Christians hate the sinner.

 

Their reply might be that they love the sinner but hate the sin. They say God does this too.  You wouldn't expect them to admit to hating.

 

The Christian is to hate sin whether in others or himself. The Church teaches that this is loving the sinner when your intention is to see the sinner cast out the sin. Love means to try and do whatever is right for the other's wellbeing but sin means crime or that which should be punished. Punishment means opposing one's well-being.

 

Love sinner and hate sin if interpreted as meaning saving the sinner from the harm that sin does implies that God will punish all unrepented sin. Many sins do no lasting harm. And doing good sometimes involves some harm too so sin causing harm is not always a big deal. Thus if a sin of say masturbating a few seconds is something to be saved from, it must be because God is waiting to punish.

 

Anybody can have a delusion - that is a belief that should be seen as wrong and yet the person still accepts it. For example, a person should accept that his wife is dead when he saw her in her coffin and being buried. He is deluded if he argues she is still alive and never died.

 

The Christian lives and moves under the delusion that he loves sinners. The Church inflicts and conditions its victims to develop a mental illness.

 

The Church has no genuine concern for people. The Church condemns hating people not out of love but out of its desire to give orders.

 

If you really love sinners and hate their sins you should be glad when people accuse you of sin wrongly as long as they say they hate the perceived sin not you. You should not care for it is not personal. But you do care for it's not true that hating your sin is not personal. It is easy for you to delude yourself that when the sins of others are hated and condemned that those people are not being hated but loved. When you are on the receiving end you soon change your tune.

 

Jesus condemned the Jews for the delusion that they were righteous and holy when in fact they were not but only acting it. Catholicism teaches that you must be free from serious sin to be saved. Protestantism says this is wrong – it says that you must have Jesus being punished for your sin in your place. At least Protestantism should not lead to such nauseating self-righteous hypocrisy as we see in Catholicism.

 

Jesus roared, “Scribes and Pharisees you hypocrites!” He said they were their own sin of hypocrisy. If he agreed with hate the sin and love the sinner he would have said, “Scribes and Pharisees you are tainted with hypocrisy.” That still leaves room for seeing good in them. Calling them hypocrites does not.
Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion would have done better if it had put forward the following reasoning.

 

God is a good being. He must love sinners and hate sins. But this is impossible. Belief in God is based on the delusion that it is possible. Therefore belief in God is a delusion.

 

Richard Dawkins said that belief in God is a delusion. The God belief is worthless without the idea that we must love sinners. Some say, "It seems to be more accurate to say that belief in God may not necessarily be a delusion but it is necessarily dependent on one." If so then belief in God is a tool for making a delusion deeper. But as we have seen, God is more than just based on the delusion. God by definition must embody the delusion.

 

More honest Christians reject the hypocrisy of those who claim to love sinners while detesting and wishing evil on sins. They teach, "Sometimes it is said that God hates sin (impersonal) but loves the sinner (personal), but this attempt to mitigate the wrath of God is not really faithful to the biblical witness.

 

Wrongdoing in the Bible is never disassociated from the wrongdoers, who are fully responsible for their actions. Retribution cannot be shifted to an impersonal level without it ceasing to be what it is. We cannot imagine a judge excusing a murderer who says he is sorry and offers to clean up the mess, as if the crime were all that mattered. However sincere his repentance might be, the murderer would still be held responsible for his sin, just as we are held responsible for our sins before God" (page 222, The Doctrine of God, Gerald Bray, IVP, Illinois, 1993).

 

A God who treats sin as if the sinner had nothing to do with it is refusing to admit the dignity of the sinner as a responsible agent.

 

And a God who hates sin as if it were a thing and as if there was nothing personal about it might as well torment himself over a block of ice. His hate shows self-hatred for it ruins his happiness. Self-hatred makes you a threat to other people.

 

Punishing sin but not persons is really not punishing at all. It's not retribution. It's anti-justice. If you separate the sin from the person and make the person suffer for the sin that is intended to be revenge not justice. Those who hate the sinner could be better people than you.

 

No truly good person holds that it is the crime that matters not what the crime says about the person. Indeed it would be evil to condemn an action and risk upsetting the person if it is only the action that matters. Those who believe in love the sinner and hate the sin are worse than those who admit that to hate the sin is to hate the sinner. They do justice great harm and make a laughing stock of morality. While they claim to love the sinner they show intolerance to the person who judges the sinner and who demands justice! What hypocrites they are!

 

The utter failure of love the sinner and hate the sin shows that belief in God is harmful and peppered with malice.

 

The atheist does not believe in sin. The atheist believes that the wrong we do does not offend God or break his law.

 

The atheist should in principle be able to encourage people to live better. To make people see their weaknesses and so called sins as worse than what they are only deters them a bit at least from doing good.

 

Love the sinner and hate the sin is irresponsible for we have enough problems trying to love insane and troubled people. And those of us who don't believe in sin believe that people still do wrong. Love the sinner and hate the sin gives us an interpretation of evil that is too strong and that is evil considering it is possible not to know if you hate the person or love them. "The language you are using about God being on the side of love and not on the side of hate seems like a binary or polar understanding of how these two emotions exist. From a psychological point of view, can't the emotions of love and hate sometimes seem indistinguishable? As a psychologist, how does your psychological understanding of feelings inform your theological cal or Christian understanding of those concepts? Fraser Watts: Well, I agree about the psychology ...we tend to go for a too nice, or anodyne view of God ... we need to recover some sense of the wrath of God as part of his majesty" page 148, Conversations on Religion (Continuum, London, 2008).

 

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 love the sinner hate the sin brigade want to delude the sinners that they are loved.  Believers says sinners are deluded that they can sin against God and be okay.  Sin is allegedly caused by the delusion that it is okay to commit it and so it is not really a sin.  Deluded people project their madness unto others and Christians are no exception.  The deluded point the finger at the deluded.

 

Love the sinner and hate the sin is good training in false virtue. Those skills will be called on when the religious person decides to wage war in the name of faith and Church and God.

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