Loving the sinner and hating the sin and is it difficult?

 
Religion commands us to love the sinner and hate the sin.  If loving sinner and hating their sin is possible then it is difficult. We will check how difficult it is, assuming keeping the rule is possible.

 

Hate leads to hate.  The love the sinner and hate the sin say that and say it is a prime reason for meeting the sinner with love not hate.  But this reason is a lie.  So their whole approach is called into question and also their sincerity.  They just hate the sinner and risk the sinner and are denying it.  It is also said that love leads to love. It is also said that hate or love not only lead to being succeeded by hate and love but amplify hate and love. So take hate. Over time it might be said to be 1 replaced by 1 replaced by 1. But in fact it is 1 that becomes 2 and becomes 3 and gets worse and worse.  And hate not only gets worse as an individual thing but it leads to new hates - to hate one person soon leads to you hating two and so on.  Hate will thrive best if you tell yourself it is the sin not the person you want to see hurt.  Hate against the person lurks in the shadows.  If hating anything is going to be hard the person doing the thing you hate will be in the firing line.  You will fail and the longer time goes on the failing will get worse. 

 

Is love the sinner and hate the sin absolutist or consequentialist?


Religion says it is both. God absolutely forbids in all times and places hating the sinner. God absolutely forbids in all times and places loving the sin so it is to be hated. The loving sinner and hating sin has the result of being good for the sinner and bad for the sin so the future will be better.


For religion, the wrongness of hating sinners and agreeing with sin in any sense instead of totally disagreeing with it are non-negotiable principles. So they are the reason loving sinners is right and hating sinners is wrong without even considering the consequences of hating sinners and loving their sins. People always think of consequences when they think of morality and claim to be worried about the principle when it is only the consequences they worry about. That is why love the sinner and hate the sin is so poorly practiced.
 
Virtue is about your character – the kind of person you are, what you are as a person. If you are kind, you are kind as a person. Selfish virtue is when you are in a manmade or corrupt religion and work to be virtuous as if it does not matter what effect the religion or its faith has on other people. It is not virtue at all but a dangerous copy. With virtue it is easier to go from shameless vice to virtue than it is to go from fake virtue to true virtue. You end up not seeing how bad you are. If love the sinner and hate the sin is not possible or achievable, it is evil less possible and achievable if you are religiously and spiritually corrupt as you “flourish” in a religion made by man.  If it is possible then it is never possible if you follow the religion of man.  Only God has the right to create a religion.  Indeed it is only a pseudo-religion if man makes it.  Man has no authority to lay religious rules and doctrines and obligations on anyone unless God tells him.

Religion warns that hatred of sin easily becomes hatred of the sinner. Logically, the more you hate sin the more easily you might hate the sinner. And the more you could be in denial that you hate the sinner. The more you hate the sin the more likely you are to be a danger to the sinner and hate the sinner.
 
The religious claim that we must hate the sin because we love the sinner is a bizarre one. They should admit they advocate hating the sin in spite of the loving the sinner. But that would be admitting that they try to make it difficult to love the sinner. So they should say, love the sinner but hate the sin. The but would imply there is an obstacle between them.
 
If we love the sinner and hate the sin then clearly the worse we make sin out to be the harder it is going to be. We can hate the act of murder if we see it as the murderer degrading himself and taking the life of another and as an attack on society and law and order and as bringing grief to the family and friends of both victim and killer. But if we see murder as a sin against God - and especially a God that is supposed to have incarnated as a man to die for our sins - we are making the sin out to be worse than what it is.
 
Christianity says that sin gives bad example and is thereby putting others in danger of going to suffer everlasting punishment. If you think that Annie having great fun with free love makes her dangerous to your impressionable children then how could you avoid hating her? It would take heroism to hate her sin without hating her.
 
The Church admits that our inclination is to hate the sin and the sinner together. It says that loving the sinner and hating the sin can only be done with the help of God and it often takes a long struggle. Isn't it fanaticism to teach a doctrine that we must hate sin when it leads so many to hate the sinner? Isn't it fanatical to excuse this by saying there may be a supernatural power to help? Is this any different in principle from the man who jumps from the temple believing that angels will save him and if they don't then it was their will for him to die or cripple himself so he is not doing wrong? Our love for the sinner would be a grudging love. We might as well not bother!
 
If we forgive the sinner because God won't be pleased if we don't or because we wish not to be eaten up by hate, isn't this forgiveness grudging? We only give it not because we want to do good for the one who has hurt us but for other reasons so it is grudging. It is unforgiveness wrapped up in the guise of forgiveness.

 

Love sinner and hate sin is tactical for it is about stopping sinful actions and one way to do that is to make the sinner feel loved so that she or he will desist and repent.  Those who love their sin will not want that Christian love! It gets them to put walls up. It is really about people feeling smug that they oppose sin while they in fact empower others to get better at it and more intransigent.
 
A child molester will be hated even if it is known that he can't control his urge to sexually interfere with children. A man out of his mind on drugs who fatally poisons school-kids will be hated. These are clear cases where the evil is separated from the doer. But it doesn't stop the hatred or stem it. If you feel that way about somebody who has an addiction or mental illness which takes away their responsibility what will you feel about the person who does wrong on purpose? We hate people who can be separated from their evil. Imagine then what we think of those who can't! You hate the person who can be separated from the evil so how can you love the sinner who cannot be separated from her or his sin? Hating the person who can be separated from the proves that when you hate evil that people do be it deliberate or not, it is the person you hate. Admit it.
 
You hate and detest and want to hurt the insane person who is in your house chasing you with a knife. You hate the evil he wants to do but you don't consider him a sinner for he is mad. Nevertheless you feel the hatred towards him. You hate him. Love the sinner and hate the sin is just a pompous directive - it is not meant to help you. It's a smokescreen for Christian hypocrisy.
 
To hate the sin is always to hate the sinner even if there is a part of you that loves them because hate cannot exist without love.
 
The more you value the snob next door the more you will hate her for looking down on you. To advise, "Love the sinner and hate the sin" is to advise, "Do your best to hate that person's guts".
 
Christianity gives no strong case for saying that its faith is the true faith. It says God does miracles to verify the faith. But if the faith was good and was sensible and the alternatives bad then God doing miracles is really a sign of his failure to teach it properly and provide for its accurate dissemination. God ultimately does miracles to back up love sinner and hate sin. Obviously then the command is not obviously correct! So it cannot be that easy to obey the command!


Christianity admits how dangerous it is to love the sinner and hate the sin for it leads so easily and so often to hating the sinner. All religions agree. But how much worse it is if Christians take their religion seriously and believe sin can lead people to suffer in Hell forever through bad example and scandal and so on! How much worse it is when Christianity evilly condemns stupid sins such as not going to confession as soon as you sin seriously and even two seconds of masturbation as horrendously serious sins! This religion makes the risks worse. It makes the hate inevitable. This religion incites to hatred. Period.


Separating the sin from the sinner as religion lamely does is creating a form of identity religion.  It is argued that identity politics says people are to be thought of as identities not as personalities.  True.  Here we have identity religion.  So that we can pretend to love sinners we have to dehumanise them as things not people with personalities.  So love the sinner and hate the sin is more than just hard.  It does not happen.

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
 
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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