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
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