PEOPLE CHERRY-PICK WHAT SINNERS TO LOVE AND TO
HATE
Few take seriously religion's claim to love the sinner and hate the sin. The
claim is never emphasised except when religion comes under fire for condemning
people.
The promoters of love the sinner and hate the sin do agree that it can be a mask
for hating the sinner.
They say the sinner is hated with the sin when -
* The person loves one adulterer and hates another for it. That would be
hypocrisy. It is really using the person's wrongdoing as an excuse for attacking
them.
* The person does not believe in just deserts or when the person decides some
sins deserve punishment and others do not. Retribution is a foreign concept to
most people today. If you kill a person of your own free will then you deserve
capital punishment. If that principle is wrong then punishment is entirely
nonsense. Suppose capital punishment is the only real punishment for murder.
Anything else then is softness. It would be hypocritical to oppose a murderer
deserving to lose their life while you argue that he deserves punishment if he
commits other crimes. Believers in love the sinner and hate the sin give
themselves away when they cherry-pick what to punish and what not to punish.
* When the "direct" sinner is seen as worse than the sinner who sins by consent
and not directly - as in Catholicism. A direct sin is when a person hits their
parent. An indirect sin is when a person lets somebody hit their parent. They
consent to what the other has done. The argument is that the direct sinner
exercises free will more than the sinner who merely consents. That is nonsense.
* The sin is virtually harmless - like masturbation or spitting out a communion
wafer or neglecting to read holy books.
* The person is selective about what sins to hate. For example, Tony Blair's
warmongering might be excused (poor Tony meant well and had difficult though
perhaps wrong decisions to make - never mind that he lied about weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq) while Miley Cyrus is condemned for her raunchy
performances.
* The sins are over-condemned or excoriated. They are judged as so bad that they
deserve extreme punishments such as suffering in Hell forever. This point is
only made by religious people who oppose Christian and Muslim teaching about
Hell. The fact that they say their own sins deserve it too makes no difference.
The point is not who is condemned but that sin is demonised. Religion goes on
about objective moral evil - if you do such evil without being able to see that
it is vile then that is no excuse. You are seen as so bad that you can't
recognise evil. Christianity and Islam are objectively evil for they pronounce
sin as worthy of eternal Hell. The Christian/Muslim religious system certainly
is lying about hating sins and loving sinners and that is the truth even if some
individual Christians do love sinners and hate sins. People who over-condemn
sins are always selective in what sins they want to demonise. For example, the
war-mongering Catholic president will never be barred from holy communion but
the president who declares himself pro-abortion will be.
The promoters of love sinner and hate sin are right that hypocrites and those
who cherry-pick what sins to hate are hiding hate for others behind their
alleged love for them. Their real interest is their own self-glorification at
the expense of others.
Now let us examine all that.
Could it be that the person who hates one adulterer for adultery and loves
another who commits it is merely giving himself away when he claims that loving
the sinner and hating the sin is possible? It might be not that he is violating
it but showing that it makes no sense anyway. The reality is that people do pick
out what sinners to love and what to condemn. Usually the abortionist can be
loved while the child porn seller is hated. So even if you claim to hate all
sins and love all sinners correctly, you cannot expect people to believe you.
OBJECTION: X is a burglar. Y is a burglar. Mary hates X and she claims to love Y
and hate his sin. But if loving the sinner and hating the sin is possible then
perhaps she really does love Y. Her hate of X would be a separate issue. If you
love one sinner and hate his sin and if you hate another sinner with his sin
then that is two separate things. You can have one and the other.
The error or lie in this objection is that it is all about persons and not sins
or actions. If the person excuses the extreme evil of Tony Blair and slams Miley
Cyrus who never killed anyone then the person is not opposed to evil as such but
just uses it as an excuse to oppose some people. The objection seeks to endorse
the excuse. Love the sinner and hate the sin is not only hypocrisy but if it is
in fact wrong then it endorses evil. It enables evil. And it is wrong as sure as
saying you love the flu but hate the symptoms is wrong.