Love Sinners and Hate the Sins in the light of feelings
Love the sinner and hate the sin is like somebody saying
they have nothing against black people and try hard to embrace them. Both
types of person are trying to convince themselves of what is not true.
They do hate sinners and do not really accept black people when they have to
persuade themselves with some difficulty to accept them. Love the
sinner and hate the sin really means love the sinner but hate the sin.
There is a but there. When they cannot just love people but have to say
they are sinners but we love them anyway that is not real love. It is slow
poison.
The Bible says, Hebrews 1:9, "You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness;
therefore God, your God, has set you above your companions by anointing you with
the oil of joy." "Hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good" (Romans 12:9).
Psalm 97:10 says, "Hate evil, you who love the LORD, Who preserves the souls of
His godly ones; He delivers them from the hand of the wicked." Amos 5:15
says, "Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate."
To hate means to will evil for another person so to hate a sin is to will evil
to a sin as if it were a person. You cannot really hate something except
on the personal level. Religion says we must love the sinner and hate the
sin. This is contradictory if you mean that you can feel hate for a
sinner for being a sinner and love for the sinner for being a sinner.
At most you can feel love for a sinner in some ways and not as a sinner. You
might love Hitler's drive and ambition but not his sins. If love the sinner and
hate the sin means anything like that it is endorsing hatred for a person. You
can murder a person because you see enough good in them and this good makes the
bad they do make you angrier.
Bad means that which should be willed out of existence. If it were possible to
make evil vanish by the power of your will you would have to do it. Religion
says you should feel you want it to cease to exist. Thus calling somebody bad is
hate speech. It is saying the person should cease to exist if he or she is bad.
If something deserves it, then you should feel with all your power that it
should be destroyed. Your feeling of hate reinforces your attitude of hate or
the way you look at the thing as hateful.
Love sinner and hate sin is often presented as an outlook rather than feeling
love for the person and feeling hate for the sin. Loving the sinner means seeing
the person as doing their best and being flawless under the circumstances. The
act then is seen as something that is not coming from the person but as
something that is parasitic on the person. This fails to understand what an act
is and accuses you of being a robot. If you are a robot then you cannot be a
sinner! If you objectify sinners you will soon end up killing them faster than
you would if you seen them as people to be hated. Psychopaths kill far more
easily than hate-mongers.
The love the sinner and hate the sin brigade often seem to say you must not
judge. The person who judges seems to be the person who the ill-feeling is
reserved for. The judger is never seen as doing their best. So assessing an
action as bad is seen as worse than any sin including murder!
People can learn to feel the right or best emotions at the right time for such
emotions. Few of us are masters at this. It is said that does not mean we
cannot or should not be faulted if we feel inappropriate emotions or don't feel
appropriate ones. But the problem is that fixing your emotions and
conforming yourself more emotionally to reality is a lifelong journey. If
you are really trying, feeling the right things won't happen overnight. It
would be wrong to condemn a person who is trying for say feeling happy that an
enemy has died. The person may be battling this feeling. Also, if it
is wrong to have inappropriate feelings Aristotle said that if you can't help
but feel your emotions you are responsible because you made yourself the kind of
person who feels that sort of emotion. Aristotle sees the wrong emotions
as a sickness and feels we can train our responses by forcing ourselves to act
in the right and moral way. If the emotions rebel at first we will develop
the ability to enjoy the right actions. Philosopher Daniel Dennett says that educating
ourselves about the bad effects our actions have on others can help us have the
right feelings. Notice how Aristotle held that your feelings indicate what you
are as a person, what kind of person you are. Thus to love the person who has a
lot of bitterness and spitefulness inside means that you love the person as
bitter and spiteful for they are part of the person. This teaching makes it
impossible to love the sinner and hate the sin and even to love the person with
nasty feelings never mind a sinner.
The view that we should not be too annoyed when things go wrong for there are
people being tortured and slaughtered in the world is common. That
something worse exists does not make a bad thing less bad. It may make you
feel less bad about it. But feeling less bad by Aristotle's reckoning
would make you a bad person. A sin is not a thing. Strictly speaking, a person
never commits a sin but a sin shows what kind of person he or she is - a sinner
and sinful person. To hate the sin is to hate the sinner.
Religion says that love is not a feeling but acting to help others while
intending to help them. But we need people to like us so this love will not do
us much good. Real love requires feeling or at least trying to like the person.
Regardless of what religion says, we do act as if love is a feeling nearly all
the time. That cannot be ignored.
Hate is a feeling. But if you are going to make out that love is not a feeling
then you have to say that hate is not a feeling. Some teach that hate is merely
being willing to hurt others even if you feel nothing bad towards them. Religion
uses the excuse, "We feel no hatred for those who go deserve go to Hell for
their sins" to answer those who accuse it of hate. Love needs feeling more than
hate does.
If love is not a feeling then neither is hate. This teaching allows religion to
incite people to hatred and then deny responsibility on the basis that it did
not ask them to feel hate. Thus religion then can deny that it incites to hatred
if it stirs up huge ill feeling against anybody. That is dangerous. Religion is
well aware of all this for there are plenty of examples of people hating each
other on theological or religious grounds. Religion has given those people a
licence to hate while denying that they hate.
If you hate somebody for insulting you then why can't you hate those who turn
away from loving you and loving others and who turn away from loving God to
endure the suffering of Hell? They must hate everybody a lot if they would
choose torment over love. Whether it manages to get a person to hate or not, the
Hell doctrine is an attempt to incite to hatred.
So love for most of us is acting and feeling.
Love in theology and religion is acting.
Two options.
Your mental health will deteriorate fast if people have no warm feelings for you
but do good for you. It will not deteriorate as quickly - if at all - if they do
but mess you around. The first necessarily will do grave psychological harm and
the second may or may not. We do not really want a gospel of love that isn't
warm love. Love your neighbour as yourself loses its appeal in that light.
If you keep the Christian doctrine that when they love you, they do not need to
feel love for you and the feeling of love is irrelevant, in mind you will not
feel so warm inside when a Christian does something good for you. Christianity's
doctrine of love will lose its shine. It is manipulative of Christians to
attract people to their religion by engaging in personal warmth.