Love sinners not sins for you are a sinner yourself - an illogical teaching and creates false sense of humility
The "love sinners and hate sins" preacher is looking for a compliment for
teaching such a supposedly wonderful thing. Those who listen to him or her
are also looking for a compliment for they want to be seen as keeping the
awkward and impossible rule. It is virtue-signalling and far worse in
arrogance than equating your walk up the hillock with a climb on Mount Everest.
They add to their arrogance by admitting the rule is very hard to keep and that
the line between loving sin and hating sin is hard to maintain and very thin.
How can you believe these people love you in your sins when they are about the
self-praise and the alleged God praise for their condescending "love".
Forgiveness is marketed as that that helps me to grow in character because it
can help me to become a better person. Again there is a motive to fake it
or pretend you forgive for its linked to virtue-signalling.
Believers in God say we must love the sinner and hate the
sin for we are all sinners. So we love sinners for we are humble in the
knowledge that we are sinners as well.
You will see what they really think of love sinner hate sin when you admonish
them for a real or imagined sin. They will feel condemned as people and as
totally bad.
Translation: "I judge you as a sinner but I must not admit it to myself. If you
are a sinner that is what you are and my being a sinner or not has no relevance.
But I choose to oppose that truth. I am a hypocrite."
If you say John’s essay is stupid that is the same as calling John stupid though
many pretend it is not. Nevertheless, you do not argue, "I was stupid in the
past so I must pretend it is not stupid".
Love the sinner and hate the sin claims to be a recipe for humility. By loving
the sinner you are supposed to avoid pridefully hating the sinner when you are a
sinner yourself. Curiously, if Jesus has taken over your sins and had them
credited to his account by dying on the cross to be punished for them by God
then it follows that you are no longer really a sinner if you are a Christian
and CAN look down on sinners. For you, your sinful past is now a fiction because
of Jesus.
Christians surely must believe that people with mental impairments that prevent
them from sin have the right to hate sinners. The Church does not condemn hate
when engaged in by people who cannot help it.
If the Church says that being a sinner forbids you to see others as sinners it
is lying for an essential doctrine of the religion is that all are sinners.
Christian humility is false. It is really pride in disguise. You can't believe
in humility unless you pridefully believe you have the wisdom to see you should
believe in it. You are proud of your wisdom in relation to humility.
If the humility didn't make you happy in some way you would not be engaging in
it. You believe you are worthy of happiness which is a form of pride.
Christians say it is a great thing to be humble and holy and kind in private and
to hide it from others if possible. So it is bad to be humble for the sake of
wanting others to see it. That is pride. The Church says that others need to see
your humility for their own sake and not so that you are seen as humble. Is this
a subtle form of selfishness and pride? The Church warns that subtle pride is
more dangerous than open brazen pride for it is harder to diagnose and more
sneaky and deceptive. Letting others see you cannot make you proud. It is only
what you think of you that can do that. So there is more pride in YOU seeing
your humility than in others seeing it. And surely God seeing how humble you are
can engender more pride in you than others seeing it! Others only see the
outside but God sees the humility you hope is in your heart. Belief in God then
is terrific for those who want to enjoy false humility. It is great if you want
the benefits of pride and being thought humble and feeling humble while not
being really humble. That way you are getting the best out of pride.
Christianity is not based on God. It is based on self. It is not surprising then
that Christians and Jews and Muslims spew so much hatred against debunkers of
their faiths a hatred that does not exist say in Buddhists or Taoists when their
faiths are criticised.
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. There is no
real humility in loving the sinner and hating the sin for we do not apply it
equally to everybody. We are only interested in what we want and not in the
principle.
Gay people and women who have had abortions and others who are persecuted by
those who believe in God are often not blamed for throwing back the “We love you
but hate your sin” message in the faces of those who patronise them with it.
Those who use the adage are only parading their own superior virtue. It
translates as, “I am good for loving you but you are a bad sinner. I am so great
that I can love you despite your sins”. This comes out all the clearer when the
lovers claim to be sinners themselves. Bad trees bear bad fruit. Sinners cannot
do real loving acts. Love the sinner is not about humility at all. And sometimes
a person is motivated to be humble because it is his way of being better in his
own mind than everybody else.
The love the sinner hate the sin philosophy plainly implies: “I do not love you
except in so far as I want you to become good like me”. If that is love then the
word love has no definition but is nonsense and such an attitude is prideful in
the extreme.
How can we love the sinner and hate the sin without being superior and arrogant?
Believers say that the answer to the problem is to look at ourselves first! That
is really saying however, “If I am not as bad as her or him then I can look down
on her or him." If you are as bad, then you will come up with this hypothetical
thing : "If I were perfect I would hate him." You still intend that hypothetical
as it is. Your intention makes you evil.
To say that if you look at yourself first you will not hate sinners translates
as advising a person to see how they too do evil and perhaps don’t care. They
will then reason, “Why should I care about hating John for his sins against me
when I don’t hate me for sinning?”
To finish off this is the truth. You tell sinners
they are lovable and marvellous and that you detest their sins while loving
them. To separate their sins from them and hate them as if they were
nothing to do with them is thin. It will not really impress or help the sinner.
It is about how you want to signal, “I am great and I have the right attitude to
you. I am using you and your sins as an opportunity to virtue signal. The
worse your sins are the harder it is for me and I am a hero.” Praising the
person to the skies makes them feel a failure if they don’t meet with success.
It would follow that the answer is not to praise the person but to praise the
effort they make to be good. Accept yourself with your good side and your
limitations and take full responsibility for what you do.