It is a Sin to See Through Love Sinner and Hate Sin! 


Sin is rebellion against the will of God. The Christians have managed to get seen as fairly innocuous through their two-faced doctrine of detesting the rebellion and loving the rebellious person. This teaching is a cloak over Christian incitement to hatred.

It is confused with ideas such as, "love the person but hate the harm they do themselves", or, "aversion to a false religion is not aversion to the believers in that religion." These do not relate to the notion of punishment and the notion of crime. Sin does. Sin is a crime against God that deserves punishment. Many Christian believers lie that love the sinner and hate the sin means hating the harm a person does to themselves because you love the person. If God comes first then the harm the person suffers is the least of your concerns!

More honest Christians reject the hypocrisy and lies about loving sinners and hating 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 dissociated 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. But curiously, there are many people who for some reason fail to make this equation. Although they might agree in the case of the murderer, they do not accept that this principle can be applied directly to sins against God. By a process of reasoning sometimes disparagingly referred to as 'cheap grace', they believe that verbal repentance is enough to take away sin, and that if they confess to wrongdoing God will not exact any penalty from them. This procedure appears to be automatic and painless, causing the minimum of upset and inconvenience to the normal flow of everyday life. The truth, though, is that people who think like that have never really encountered the depths of the love of God in Christ. If they had they would have recognized that there is a heavy penalty to be paid for their sin - a penalty which Christ bore for us on the cross. Unless we understand that we are fully deserving of God's wrath, which he will certainly inflict on those who do evil - Romans 1:18-32, we shall never even begin to understand the depth of the love which has rescued us from our misery and from our just deserts" (page 222, The Doctrine of God, Gerald Bray, IVP, Illinois, 1993).

The doctrine of loving the sinner while hating what the sin says about the person is totally incoherent. To hate what sin says about the person is to hate the person. But because people want to hurt sinners and injure them they have to engage in protective behaviour (they are protecting themselves from themselves) by telling themselves that hating the sinner is not hating the sinner. They end up bullying those who see through their lies and those poor people end up condemned and punished while sinners go uncondemned and unpunished. The more they think sin is hateful the more they should see through their own lies and the more they have to hide the hatred they feel. The more they have to protect themselves from it.

Being vindictive towards a sin means being vindictive to the sinner. A sinner shows what he is as a person by his sin so the sin cannot be treated as if it were not him. The sin is different from him but not separate from him. The Church contradicts the truth with love the sinner and hate the sin. It gets away with the lie because people think that hating the harm is the same as loving the person but it is forgotten that sin is a judgemental term. It is about what the person deserves and not the harm done to the person as such. The Church says God judges the sin not the sinner and loves sinners. Only a miracle could make that possible. Only a miracle that can make the impossible possible can enable us to love the sinner and hate the sin. The doctrine is so outrageous that it implies it is safer NOT to believe in God.

The sin is really a name for the sinner. To love the sinner is to love the sinner. To hate the sin is to hate the sinner. The command to love the sinner and hate the sin is the basis of all religion. It is the ultimate sin to see through it. It is the ultimate sin theoretically. If loving the sinner and hating the sin is commanded and it's a sin to defy it especially when it is so basic then it is the ultimate sin to see through it. It is also the ultimate sin in reality. And the trouble is everybody does see through it though they like to forget it. When you tell a person, "I hate that thing about you" focus on the words about you. You admit that you see through loving sinners and hating sins.

The command seeks to trap people in the same hypocrisy as the following. A whore in Christianity is a woman who gives her sex for money or for nothing and outside the boundaries of Christian marriage. If she gives it for free she is the worst whore of all. Yet the Christians claim the right to say to a woman, "We love you so we have to tell you the truth. You have demeaned yourself and God by having sex with this man when you are not married to him." If they just say, "You are a whore!" there will be outrage. But if they just say she did things that fit the definition of a whore there is no problem! Love the sinner would imply you love her by not calling her a whore. Hate the sin implies that you say she does whatever you can find in the dictionary beside the word whore. But there is no real difference at all. The only difference is in the conditioned imagination and emotions of the parties concerned. And that is not a difference at all but an illusion.
 
A sin is an act that ideally - or in principle - should draw down suffering and punishment. To love the sinner because of the sin in the sense that you see the sin as harmful to them is impossible. That is really hating the harm and not the sin. To love the sinner in spite of the sin implies you are trying to force yourself to love and you are on the edge of hating the person with the sin.  Love the sinner and hate the sin translates as, "I want you to be happy and only if you give up the sin. I will not make you happy in the sin. If I am good to you it is to help you give the sin up." If it was stated like that people would see through it. But it suits religion to lack transparency.
 
Jesus said that a man who looks at a woman with lust commits adultery in his heart and he said that if your eye causes you to sin it is better if you gouge it out (Matthew 5). He said this to indicate the abhorrence that he considers to be due to even a harmless sin of lust.   Jesus said we must hate sin so much that we would rather lose an eye than use it to look lustfully at a woman (Matthew 5). This is a clear example of where a religious leader wants people hated but doesn't want to admit it. If you said you loved mountain climbers but hated mountain climbing as a sin nobody in their right mind would believe you.
 
Tolerance is about putting up with deeds or people who are regarded as evil and you are forced to put up with them because intolerance only makes the problems worse. Tolerance of the person is a form of rejection of the person. Tolerance rejects the notion of loving sinners and hating sins. Acceptance of sinners would imply that you treat them as equal to good people. A God who accepts sinners will welcome them into Heaven regardless of how bad they are. He will put the person before their sins. The happiness of the person matters most. The person matters most. The sins have to be forgotten for the sake of the person. This is not the same as loving the sinner and hating the sin. In fact it is choosing to overlook the hatefulness of the sins for the sake of the person.
 
Religion advocates cold-blooded hatred and dresses it up so that it still manages to come up smelling of roses. I am referring to its doctrine: “Hate the sin but love the sinner”. To hate is to oppose the wellbeing of. To oppose the wellbeing of anything is an act of violence. The absurdity of hating a thing and wanting to hurt it shows that you must be stirring up love of violence in you. To pretend the sin is not part of the sinner actually means you refuse to look at how you can hurt the sinner by hurting and hating it. It contradicts the alleged love you have for the sinner.

Religion urges us to love sinners and hate their sins on the grounds that the alternative is to praise sin and to encourage the sinner to do it. It is a strange kind of love that is not just done but has to be treated like the best option. A wife wants to be simply loved by her husband because she is loved. It is not about him doing it because the alternatives are to not care about her or to hate her. See the point? If the love is suspect then surely the alleged hate for the sin not the sinner is really in fact hate for the sinner after all!

Some say that you can affirm the person and praise their action so you can love the sinner and hate the sin. But affirming and praising are constructive. Love the sinner would be constructive and hating sin destructive so the two are not the same. Affirming the person is seen as feeling that the person is good. Praising is said to be about actions not persons. But we know you can praise persons and this is the same as affirming. Those who say praising and affirming are not the same may present the following examples. Praising is, "Jody, thank you for writing that beautiful letter." Affirming is, "Jody I adore you as a letter-writer." But both are directed at a person. With the praising you thank Jody as a person. You also thank her as a person when you tell her you adore her as a letter-writer. She may feel more pleased when you say the latter but it does not follow that there is any essential difference between the meaning of the two examples. If to thank Jody for writing the letter is to say you adore her as the letter-writer then clearly to praise her actions is really just to praise her. To condemn her sins is to condemn her. To say you don't condemn her completely means nothing as anybody in jail will know. They get no consolation and indeed suffer more at the thought that they are made to pay for an evil that is part of them but not all of them.

If you love the sinner and hate the sin then you may forgive the sinner and still hate their sin. If the sin is not the sinner and to be treated as separate then why not? Indeed as religion says you do not love the sinner if you encourage or like his sin it follows that forgiveness should not make much of a difference!

We see that belief in God can only lead to craftiness, lies and hypocrisy. The Catholic book, Ecumenical Jihad says that gay people usually are the ones who reject this love sinner but hate sin stuff. It says they are identifying their sin with all of their personality. In other words, they are saying there is no distinction between their sin and their entire selves (page 45). There is real rancour in the book’s assertion that this is what Hell is, sinners admitting they are their sin and preferring to suffer in Hell forever rather than turn to the God who loves them and hates their sin for they see his hatred of sin as hatred for them. This puts the gays in the same boat as the damned. And Christians can’t care much about the damned for they would go out of their minds if they did. Terrifying! If it were not for the sanctimonious hate the sinner but love sin doctrine this classification of those who reject it as extreme sinners would not exist. If they are extreme sinners then any good they do is false for they equate themselves and all their being with sin. Humanists will not have attitudes like that towards people who do that for they reject free will and see evil as sickness.
 
If Hell is for those who hold they are their sin it follows that to notice that love the sinner and hate the sin is hypocritical nonsense is to guarantee your damnation. This is pure vindictive hatred on the part of the Church. They want us to rot in Hell forever for the truth and for seeing through their pretence. It must be an extremely grave sin. The doctrine of loving sinners and hating sin is the rock the faith is built on. Nothing makes sense without 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.
 
Clearly there is an element of blackmail in Church teaching. People are made scared of their doubts about the doctrine. Without the doctrine there is no point in having faith in God or religion so the whole religious edifice depends on it. And religion threatens Hellfire for those who trust in God and his story as revealed in the Bible and through the Church and who lose their faith or abandon it.
 
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. You have to hate the sin with the sinner for the sinner is the sin. You have to hate the sin with the sinner for the sinner is the sin. 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. When the Church says you must love sinners and hate sins, it gives you other doctrines that contradict this. It is pure whitewashing.

Christianity is one religion that ought to admit that it is obscurantist and does not want people to realise that love the sinner and hate the sin is rubbish. It in fact bullies those who see through it as if they are evil and dangerous.
 
 
THE WEB

www.shilohcommunitychurch.org/love_sinr.htm
TRUE OR FALSE? GOD LOVES THE SINNER BUT HATES THE SIN, FALSE, Errol Hale
 
www.ffrf.org/fttoday/back/hatred.html
With Perfect Hatred by Dan Barker
 
http://www.godhatesfags.com/
A Baptist anti-gay site
  
BOOKS CONSULTED

BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, Friedrich Nietzsche, Penguin, London, 1990
CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, Veritas, London, 1995
ECUMENICAL JIHAD, Peter Kreeft, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1996
GOD IS NOT GREAT, THE CASE AGAINST RELIGION, Christopher Hitchens, Atlantic Books, London, 2007
HANDBOOK OF CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, Monarch, East Sussex, 1995
HOW DOES GOD LOVE ME? Radio Bible Class, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1986
IN DEFENCE OF THE FAITH, Dave Hunt, Harvest House, Eugene, Oregon, 1996
MADAME GUYON, MARTYR OF THE HOLY SPIRIT, Phyllis Thompson, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1986
MORAL PHILOSOPHY, Joseph Rickaby SJ, Stonyhurst Philosophy Series, Longmans Green and Co, London, 1912
OXFORD DICTIONARY OF PHILOSOPHY, Simon Blackburn, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996
PRACTICAL ETHICS, Peter Singer, Cambridge University Press, England, 1994
PSYCHOLOGY, George A Miller, Penguin, London, 1991
REASON AND BELIEF, Brand Blanschard, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1974
REASONS FOR HOPE, Ed Jeffrey A Mirus, Christendom College Press, Virginia, 1982
THE ATONEMENT: MYSTERY OF RECONCILIATION, Kevin McNamara, Archbishop of Dublin, Veritas, Dublin, 1987
SINNERS IN THE HANDS OF AN ANGRY GOD, Jonathan Edwards, Sword of the Lord, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, undated
THE BRIEF OF ST ANTHONY OF PADUA (Vol 44, No 4)
THE IMITATION OF CHRIST, Thomas A Kempis, Translated by Ronald Knox and Michael Oakley, Universe, Burns & Oates, London, 1963
THE LIFE OF ALL LIVING, Fulton J Sheen, Image Books, New York, 1979
THE NEW WALK, Captain Reginald Wallis, The Christian Press, Pembridge Villas, England, undated
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN, CS Lewis, Fontana, London, 1972
THE SATANIC BIBLE, Anton Szandor LaVey, Avon Books, New York, 1969
THE STUDENT’S CATHOLIC DOCTRINE, Rev Charles Hart BA, Burns & Oates, London, 1961



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