Love Sinner and Hate Sin in the light of how Belief in Hell Amplifies the Hate
Sin is a crime against the law of God. Sin according to the Bible will be
punished eternally. You go to Hell for it and you will never be forgiven. Your
only hope is to repent before you die - once you die it is too late. A truly
good and warm person will find their blood runs cold at such a doctrine. They
will only accept it as a last resort like it is an undeniable truth. Christians
accept it too easily and seem too happy. That is worrying. Even worse, most of
them accept the traditional doctrine that Hell is a place where God enjoys
inventing new torments for the people he has imprisoned forever and they
gleefully go and worship this God! Is the human tendency to act good but to
prefer others to do our vindictive dirty work for us at work?
Top Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas said the sinner
deserves endless duration of punishment for the problem is not the time used to
commit a crime but how malicious the crime is. Believers tell you you can
take a couple of seconds to murder but this will land you in jail for life.
Aquinas held that endless duration though just would be made unjust if the
sinner could change and turn away from sin. So for him, it is both justice and
down to the fact that the sinner has made an ultimate unchangeable choice.
This makes no sense. If you have earned punishment and it should be
forever then that is what justice says you must have. It does not matter
if you reform or not. To say it is just if you will not change is
admitting that it is not just at all. In reality what we have here is,
"The person should not be put away from God forever even if he or she deserves
it. The person is too valuable for that. But we don't care. We
will try to blame the person and how they will not repent. Their
stubbornness cannot make it right but we will say it does." In
reality, the doctrine of Hell is used as a cover for hating the sinner. It
is pure hate for what does the sins of somebody in the next continent have to do
with you?
Religion says that free will is necessary to make love possible. Unless we
freely become love, we cannot really love but merely go through the motions.
Free will is about what we become and is not, strictly speaking, about what we
do. What we do speaks of what we are. Evil deeds do not make you evil. You do
them because you already are evil. The doctrine then that we are to love sinners
and hate sins contradicts the respect that is due to free will if we have it. If
free will is a gift, free will is only a gift for the loving and a curse for the
unloving and those who encounter them for they must hate them.
Are we to love sinners so that our love will touch them and they will want to
become more loving themselves? Is our love about doing nothing to make them
worse and inspiring them to think about doing better?
Then we are not loving them for themselves but to change them. That is a
patronising excuse for love. But it is encouraged by the thought that the sinner
will go to Hell unless he or she repents. Fearing a person going to Hell is not
the same as loving them and such a doctrine will make you unsure if you love
them or not. Fear confuses.
Another problem is how God is the origin of all things so we have to value
things because he makes them which means we really value only him not them and
use them solely as means of honouring him. Sin is the wish to destroy God as he
is for evil is his opposite. Thus it is said to deserve endless suffering in
Hell. If you think God is so great you cannot be blamed if you hate those who
insult him and laugh at his rules. Their sins are so terrible that they ask for
everlasting punishment. The sinners may not want this punishment but they demand
it.
The doctrine that if you die in sin and go to Hell forever to spend eternity
rejecting love and God clearly affirms that you do evil because you are evil.
The Catholics seem to deny that human nature is a sin nature or that humans are
sinful by nature which means the Bible teaching that they are sinful by nature
is being rejected and Catholicism cannot be considered a genuine Christian
Church. Those who do not see that they are sinners by nature cannot be saved.
They cannot be saved for they cannot bond with God for he is pure goodness. This
is the clear Bible teaching.
Christ taught that if you die without being forgiven your sins, you will be
detained in the suffering of Hell forever and there will be no forgiveness. The
Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches agree with him.
How does that impact on the Christian doctrine that we are to love sinners in
spite of their sins or to love them because of their sins? To love in spite of
means you feel hate for them and struggle against it. Belief in Hell makes it
harder if not impossible. To love them because of their sins implies that the
worse they are the more love they should get and it's a bizarre notion. It
implies that if you agree with people going to Hell then you hate their guts.
Subtle hate or hate that is directed at us in crafty and subtle ways is the
worst of the lot. We all have some hate towards people in us. Love the sinner
and hate the sin only makes that hate harder to identify and to recognise. It
gives it more power and makes it sneaker and more devious. Accusing a person of
sin or of a crime against God only makes it harder to love them.
If you think nobody deserves to go to Hell or can deserve it, your subtle hate
will be weaker than it will be in a person who believes the opposite. Those who
think Hell only happens to other people and not their loved ones are really
making themselves happy at the thought of strangers suffering there.
If Hell is not about sin but about choice then it is not sin that puts you
there. Even if it is a sin to choose Hell it does not follow that it is sin that
puts you in it if you go there. It is the choice element that does that. It is
not the sin as whole or as a punishable offence. Some say that nobody deserves
Hell and that those who are there are not there because they deserve it but
because they choose it. But if they choose it they must deserve it. Then Hell is
their punishment. If they do not deserve it then they should not be there (in
the justice sense) and how could anybody be really good in Heaven and not spend
eternity devastated at the suffering of Hell?
The First Letter of John says that if you do not love your brother whom you see
you cannot love the God you do not see. So it says loving God and your neighbour
go together. It really means that you must love God in your neighbour and is not
really saying you love your neighbour. That is why the two go together.
Otherwise it would be ridiculous. You would not hear a wife saying to her
husband that unless he loves the fisherman down the road he cannot love her. She
would be crazy if she did. She would be a bully and guilty of not really loving
or appreciating her husband.
A Protestant visionary said she saw John Paul II damned in Hell. The Catholics
were quick to see this as a sign of her hate for him for she assumed he was in
Hell on the basis of a vision that may have been false. They say that anybody
can go there so surely if that girl hates the pope then the Catholics hate all
of us in so far as they say we can go to Hell and can deserve it? It may not be
a very strong hate but it is hate.
Love the sinner makes it impossible to put God first. Believers state that you
worship God - declare the full worth of - by imitating him and being in a
relationship with him. God cannot love the sinner and hate the sin if he
sentences the person to Hell forever. That is refusing to separate the sin and
the sinner and to treat them separately. It is the person that is sent to Hell
not the sin. The Bible is clear in many places that God hates the sinner as
well, not just the sin. Loving the sinner means loving the wellbeing of the
sinner as a sinner. Meaning you don't mind what evil they do or become. Sin is
not a thing so it cannot be loved in the sense that its wellbeing matters. It
cannot have wellbeing as it is evil. The Bible says God loved the world so much
that He gave His life for sinners. How does that fit the notion that God hates
sinners? God loves a contrite heart, but not an obstinate sinner. It is only
repentant sinners that are loved by God. The other sinners are hated.
If it is true that you need to love God in order to love sinners then clearly as
God cannot love sinners and hate sins then you cannot love him. So when you
claim to love sinners that claim is suspect.
Saying you love God and that enables you to love sinners is really saying, "How
great am I for I have developed this belief that enables me to love sinners."
That is terrific humility! Others will see through it.
Christianity requires that people believe in everlasting punishment called Hell.
In Catholicism, if you masturbate you commit a sin that will put you there
unless you repent before death. After death it is too late. Masturbation is an
example of mortal sin. If the mortal sins of murder and blasphemy put you in
Hell forever, then seeing through loving the sinner and hate the sin will
warrant Hell even more! The principle is so basic to religion that rejecting it
is in principle the worst sin of all. It is better then if you have a choice
between the two sins to become a mass murderer. The doctrine of Hell blackmails
those who have their suspicions about the sincerity of loving sinners and hating
sins! It forces them to pretend that they think it is true - that is no way to
make people loving.
When you hate anything, you are afflicting yourself. Hate, no matter what it is
directed at, isn’t a very wholesome or nice sensation. It eats you up and
damages your regard for yourself and your relationship with others.
If somebody says they are a fool, you know this is not true. They are not summed
up by any mistake they make or any wrong they do. But if you believe in sin that
deserves and takes you to the everlasting punishment of Hell, mortal sin, then
clearly you are to be summed up by your mortal sin. No wonder the Church says
that if you commit a mortal sin of say masturbation and do not repent all the
good you do will bring you no merit before God. He will not reward it for he
sees it as you trying to be good on your terms not his. Mortal sin and hate go
together.
If you feel threatened by the world and see it as posing threats to your
happiness and emotional wellbeing, you will tell yourself that you are a fool so
that it does not expect much of you. Telling yourself you are a fool is
protective behaviour. There is enough to fear without fearing the alleged
results of sin and everlasting punishment and fearing what God might do. Your
fear will lead to hate against others. It is a timebomb.
We all tend to love some people with faults and hate others who are no better or
no worse than them. Religion says everybody is a sinner. We always condemn or
hurt others because of something we don’t like in them. That is worse than
hating a person because of their sin. Why? Hating a person because you feel they
do things you dislike is not understandable. It is vicious. As bad as hating a
person for breaking moral law is, it is not that petty and personal. Imagine
then the malice and the evil if you believe sin deserves everlasting torment!
You are as good as wishing it on the sinners whose sins you do not mind! You do
not hate them but act as if you are desensitised to the awful fate they will
have should they go to Hell. And you want those whose sins you hate to face
eternal punishment for personal reasons. You hate them.
Christian double standards call you to love your enemy and hate her or his sin.
The Christians say that the people condemned forever in Hell are adhering to
eternal sin. It follows then that we should hate sin for it risks people
enduring this punishment and it deserves it. If you hate sin 100%, then you will
have to hate it infinite % when you consider Hell. Also, Hell is a place of
eternal sin. Hating sin on earth will eat you up so imagine how you will be ate
up for believing in eternal sin?
Christians hypocritically bid you to forgive your enemy for your own peace of
mind, and urge you to hate something far more strongly than you would them! You
stop hating their sin and you forgive it but because you love them you hate the
danger sin put them in and the danger of everlasting torment. Very helpful! Even
if you forgive, there is plenty else to eat you up so what’s the point?
If it is hypocritical nonsense to say you love the sinner and hate the sin and
this love is really just polite hatred then the doctrine of Hell and of how
seriously God regards sin feeds that hatred. If it is hateful enough to say
somebody is a sinner, it is worse to say they deserve Hell or grave punishment
from God.
The Church teaches that the sinner is in a more dangerous condition than the
terminally sick person. The person who doubts the faith willingly or who misses
Mass is believed to deserve everlasting torment in Hell. According to this, it
is better to try and convert sinners than to care for the sick. This is a clear
example of how Christianity does not start with realities in this world but with
faith, it starts with dogmatic assumptions for which there is no evidence.
If you hypocritically advocate syrupy fake love for sinners, then when you teach
the existence of everlasting punishment for sin, you prove your vindictiveness.
No decent person agrees with people going to Hell for their sins. They could not
be decent people if they do agree for their belief in sin is just a mishmash of
hypocrisy and lies masquerading as belief. It would prove they want them to end
up in Hell. By sugar-coating their evil they get disciples as bad as themselves.