LOVE SINNER AND HATE SIN - IS IT AGAINST THE
NOTION OF FREE WILL?
Do we have free will? Is that the accurate way to frame the question?
Let us assume we must have or do have free will. We think our choices are
our creation and that we could choose other than what we do choose. Maybe
free will is not the best thing to call our capacity to do things without being
programmed or forced in any way. Maybe it is clearer if we talk about
being a responsible doer who must be accountable for what they do. It is
not so much about a faculty as it is about being a doer. Free will is
about you as a PERSON and describes you as a PERSON. Free will is how you
are a person and makes you a person. In other words you could say it is best to
drop the talk about free will and talk about free doer or free chooser.
That highlights how personal this is. Free will is not a faculty like
seeing. You are not "seeing" as such but you are doing so you are a doer.
Free will then is not a faculty in the way seeing is. Free will is
misleading for it focuses on a person's ability to be free when in fact the
subject is that the person is free will in other words a responsible doer.
Free will then is essentially another word for person - to reduce it to a
faculty or ability is like reducing a same sex attracted person to gay sex. Free
will is people. Most of us by instinct see it that way without realising
we do. That us why we see what a person does as a communication about them
as a person - it is about what way they are a person. The sin or crime
cannot be separated from the perpetrator for to be a bad doer is to be a bad
person.
Religion, particularly and notoriously Christianity, insists that you must love the sinner and hate the sin for to accept sin in any way makes you a sin as well because of your attitude. This is not a call to virtue or acceptance of another person at all but a call to suppress and repress. Repression only makes the problems worse. The negative feelings are still there and they gain in power for they are denied and will explode. They come out in worse and more insidious ways.
A sinner is a person who commits sin of his own free
agency or free will. Free will is only revered by religion because it wishes to
blame evil and sin on us and say that God is innocent. When you tell religious
people that an all-good God who has the power to eradicate all evil cannot be
really good when he lets the innocent suffer terribly, they reply that he gave
us free will to use it wisely and we don't. So it is our fault. The free will
doctrine is about saving God's reputation.
People who claim to love the sinner and hate the sin deserve to be met with
scepticism and disbelief because they do not believe in free will for our sake
but God's. If I love you and if free will to be righteous or unrighteous is a
honour then I will not regard you as free solely or mainly to salvage God's
reputation and to be able to argue that he is good despite the evil in the
universe.
God by definition alone ultimately matters for he is all-good therefore it is a
sin to uphold free will for the sake of human dignity more than his dignity.
Ultimately it should all be about God and honouring him.
Free will is the power to do a or b without it being all or largely compulsion
or down to programming. It is understood by many as involving a choice between
good or evil. For religion, it is the power to serve God or defy him which is
sin. Though religion calls sin evil, the non-religious understanding of free
will and the religious is not the same. For religion, good done without
reverence for God is counterfeit good and is really evil. And evil is not just
doing harm. For religion it is breaking the law of God. The lawbreaking is the
real problem not the harm. For the non-religious, evil is just whatever is done
to deliberately hurt others.
Clearly, if you can love the evil person and hate his evil, that does not mean
you can love the sinful person and hate his sin. Indeed if you hate sin not
primarily because it harms but because it is against a rule, then you are being
malicious. You must be categorising the person as a sinner in order to hate
them. Admit it.
Assume free will is about making a choice between right and wrong and God and
Satan etc.
If the sinner is to be separated from his sin as if they are not connected then
this is only right if sinners and sins are not connected and there is no free
will.
And if you think somebody can be a sinner without their sins being part of them
or what makes them what they are then clearly you are insane. What do you call
them sinners for? If belief in free will requires such insanity then clearly
even if we have free will we are too deranged despite outward appearances to use
it. Belief in free will blocks the use of free will.
Free will, if real, must be about not merely doing evil or good but becoming
evil or good.
Free will to mean anything must mean the choice to be lovable or despicable. But
if we are to love our enemies and to love the wicked then we are denying them
their choice. We are not respecting their free will at all. What we are doing is
making their freedom to do evil or to be despicable pretty pointless. It is like
giving somebody the freedom to steal and not thinking of them as a thief but as
somebody to be loved. You can’t give somebody this freedom unless you are
willing to think of them as a thief. Sinners must have the right to love
themselves as well no matter what they do if we are to love them. What kind of
free will is this that doesn’t allow the despicable to be despised? It’s
nonsense. They are being treated as if their evil doesn’t matter. How can evil
matter unless you hate the producer of the evil? If free will is the reason why
there is suffering in the world not God as believers say then how can they claim
that we must love the sinner and detest the sin? They are destroying their
belief and they are admitting that their God is evil and cruel and that they
want to turn a bind eye to it.
The believers would say that free will can be summarised as the power to hate
the sinner and the sin or love sinner and hate the sin. But we cannot love the
sinner and hate the sin. Sin means that which is to be punished and it is wrong to
let it be unpunished - only the sinner can be punished. So to punish the sin is
to punish the sinner. If one is hated so is the other. The believers are forced
to reply that God makes loving the sinner possible by some sort of miracle but
that would be God doing the impossible – doing something contradictory. No other
miracle would have any value as evidence for his power if he can do something as
incoherent as that. Neither God or his actions would make sense. Whatever
miracles prove it is not God. In so far as God's power helps you to act and be
good, it is not you that is doing it. If God enables me to love my enemy then it
is not really me that is doing it. The miracle denies our free will. How can we
be free if we need a miracle to choose to love sinners and hate their sins?
The miracle notion says we are incorrigibly evil unless God reaches down to us
to force us to be good like we are drugged puppets. That is a very nasty and
negative doctrine though the cynic may cherish it!
Free will is a function for deciding what you will do. It
is about deciding first. It is not about morality first. Giving it a religious
role is vile for it suggests, “If you do x then you have done wrong in the eyes
of God and that is what matters.” God based forgiving and seeking his pardon is
inherently degrading. It involves denial of what free will is all about.
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!
The attempt to say we love sinners and hate sin and believe in free will has
evil implications. The attempt needs to stop.