LOVE SINNER - HATE SIN
WHICH ONE OF THESE IF ANY HAS MOST IMPORTANCE?

Everybody believes that if you violate somebody’s love for you in a grave and heinous way the person will hate you. They say it is true to say that the person has some love for you but only as long as they are willing to forgive you and effect reconciliation.  The hate will obviously be the strongest thing for you will not reconcile unless the other person repents and changes for the better and makes amends.  The love then is conditional.  Here we have a case of where the hate is the strongest and the love is conditional and therefore not really love at all.  Love the sinner and hate the sin supposedly advocates unconditional love but does it really?  In practice it is only conditional love that will be expected to happen.  Such love easily turns to hate and may even have the hate simmering away beneath in disguise.

The doctrine that God unleashes anger and hate against the sin not the sinner implies that he torments himself over something abstract and that is really self hate. If God hates himself what hope is there for us and he cannot complain if we hate each other.  To really hate a thing implies seeing it as a person even if it is not and that is cruel. He intends to hurt sin as if it were a person.  God’s hate for sin then would go out of control if it were not for his love for the sinner. God’s viciousness is curtailed but that makes him a bad God. If hypothetically he could unleash his wrath against the sin and not see the sinner to be loved he would. The hurt then would damage the sinner for the sin cannot be hurt but only the sinner can.  The sinner is hurt by God's two-faced and conflicted and schizophrenic "love."

Those who claim to love the sinner and hate the sin will have a ratio where the love is less than the hate. It could be 10% love and 90% hate.

Why do you feel so violated and so often disproportionally so when some kinds of wrong are done to you?  The small amount of money stolen from your bank account by a skimmer will eat at you the whole day?  Why some sins against you and not others have that effect is not clear? The tendency to hate and wish evil on those who hurt you is very strong and programmed into you.  A mere perception that some action violates you and violates morality is enough to trigger such a response.  Every condemnation of immoral actions has the potential to cause you to hate the person.

The husband who beats his wife to a pulp because of her adultery will say it happened because he loves her. He will even believe that. The doctrine of love the sinner hates the sin trains him to manipulate his wife to get her to believe he loves her.
 
What about the man who beats his wife just because the dinner was cold? He might tell her that he felt she didn't love him enough when the dinner was so pathetic.

The claim that you love is very easily used to cover up the evil you do to another especially if there is a worse evil you might have done. The wife-beater who hits his wife for mentioning her ex-lover will say he did it out of love for her. He is sugar-coating his evil. He is trying to reduce the level of support she should get as an abused wife. He is trying to keep her feeling loved. If she believes in loving evil people and hating their evil she will fall for his manipulations. And if he believes it he will fail to see just how evil his deed was. Both will not see the evil for what it is when it was the one punch but though they should see it better if she is beaten up to a pulp it is possible that this too will be seen as evil through a fog.

Nobody says the Christian command to love the sinner and hate the sin is easy. Thus it is certain that most people think the command is hypocritical and impossible. You know that by observation as well. Thus the more you command people to hate and battle against sin in society the more you risk people turning on others. If the command is that hard to keep then condemning sin is indirectly inciting hatred against the sinner. If the command is definitely impossible then it is indirectly inciting hatred but far more strongly.

The law of the land ignores and opposes the notion of loving the criminal and hating his crime. People have to be influenced by it and have to be lying when they say they love sinners and hate sins.

Those who say the command is impossible sometimes say that by the magical grace of Jesus you can keep the commandment. Thus if you are a Muslim or don't respect Jesus you don't have this supernatural help and are good for nothing but hating sinners.

It is also the consensus that the more you love somebody the more likely it is that it will turn to hate if they cross you or if you think they have. The more you love the worse the hate will be. When there is such a thin line between love and hate, when it is so easy for love to change into hate, surely love the sinner and hate the sin is an unsafe teaching?

Religion claims you must forgive and love the sinner but hate the sin. If sin and sinner are that separate then you can forgive the sinner and not forgive the sin! That point shows how ludicrous the claim is. But let us forget that for the moment.

What comes first? Loving the sinner? Hating the sin? Can you do both? If you can, then human nature means you are going to do one more than the other or one or the other.

The Church says you have to do the two equally at the one time. It says that if you love the sinner more than you hate the sin then it follows that you don't really think the sin is that bad for the sinner or that harmful. They reason that if you love the sinner you will hate the sin in which he harms his virtue and his happiness and wellbeing. If you hate the sin more than you love the sinner then it follows that you hate the sinner. You cannot hate anybody unless you admire them in some way.

Are there many people that can balance the two? And if they do then one will outweigh the other maybe in five minutes! Many will imagine that they can balance them and be wrong. It is dangerous to hate a person and think you actually love them. The doctrine of love the sinner and hate sin does great harm. Even if it is good in theory, its results are not theory but real and bad.

Religion gives absolutely no help at all in balancing them. Human nature will keep loving the sinner one minute and hating her for her sin the next.

The two cannot be balanced and religion has no business saying. "To love the sinner is to hate the sin and vice versa." They are not the same they are two separate things that religion attempts to relate or connect together.

Suppose Satan needed medicine to live. If Jesus cares about his wellbeing and not his sins or how dangerous he is he will give him the medicine. If Jesus is afraid to help him for he will recover and do terrible harm to others he might refrain for their sake. That would mean that anybody loving you and hating your sins is not necessarily going to help you or work for your wellbeing. So it is odd why people take consolation from the love the sinner and hate the sin doctrine. The love is not about the other person's wellbeing at all but about them.

It is NEVER the bad act we hate but what the person has become in doing the act. So hating the sin is impossible. What is possible is hating the sinner. Hate the sin is a polite way of telling us to hate the sinner and to lie to ourselves that we hate the act not the person. We have to harm ourselves by a passive-aggressive attempt to pretend that our anger against the person is directed at the sin not the person.

The sin becomes the person as it were. Religion says you hate the sin because you love the person. Loving the sinner will come before hating the sin and is more important so the sin will be treated as unimportant or even nice. If we are to love the sinner and hate the sin then we are to love the sin if the sin is the person. This is wholly incoherent.

Anger involves a crave to exaggerate a person's faults and wrongdoings. To bury it makes it more dangerous for then it festers and cannot be dealt with when its presence is disguised. With anger, you fuel the horrible feeling of resentment and wanting to hurt another. That in itself is making the person out to be more worthy of anger than what they really are. Anger always inflates your perception of how bad the other person is. The anger will be stronger than your alleged love for the sinner. The love is not a passionate love and the anger is passionate.

Jesus said we should prefer to lose an eye than to sin with it. If we love the sinner and hate the sin then the worse we make sin out to be the harder it is going to be to love the sinner. 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.

If God should be loved first of all, above all things, it follows that hating the sin is more important than loving the sinner. Why? Because, he hates sin infinitely and not to hate what he hates would not be putting him first. If you hate the sin more than you love the person then you might as well hate the person too for your attitude will be hurtful to him and will lead to you losing sight of him being a person. Religion encourage righteous anger when people do not serve God's cause or love him.

Religion is based on the notion that we must avoid sin and hate it. If it's not worthy of hate, then it is no big deal. We should then just fine the murderer a few dollars and then say, "He is mostly good. The evil is only a drop of dirt in the ocean of his goodness." 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.

If you love the sinner and hate the sin then are you to love the sinner more because of the sin or less because of the sin? Or do you just love the person neither more or less?

The sinner is to be thought of as separate from the sin because you can't love sinners and hate their sins if you don't separate. If the sinner should be loved more because of the sin then the poor sinner is a victim. This would be patronising and insulting and not to mention laughable. Also, it would mean that hating the sin requires indulging the sinner.

If you love the sinner less than you hate their sin then you hate the sinner with the sin. 

If it is not more or less then you do half of the two options.

You never win.

We all tend to love some people with faults and hate others who are no better or no worse than them. Religion says everybody is a sinner. We always condemn or hurt others because of something we don’t like in them. That is worse than hating a person because of their sin. Why? Hating a person because you feel they do things you dislike is not understandable. It is vicious. As bad as hating a person for breaking moral law is, it is not that petty and personal. Hating sin is going to be stronger than loving the sinner.

The person who praises you and who avoids saying anything that reflects badly on you is in fact judging you indirectly. They have to judge you to leave out the bad stuff. They want to give you the illusion that they are non-judgmental. They are hypocrites. When you are praised and take no joy in it it is probably because you realise that the praise was artificial and latently barbed. You will not feel this person worships you as a person but not your sins.

The doctrine about loving the sinner but hating the sin makes no sense any more than saying you should trust the sinner but not the sin would. It is never the sin that bothers us but the character of the person committing the sin. It is the person for character is part of what makes the person a person. Christians lie when they say, “We don’t hate sinners, we hate sin”. Love cannot exist without trust. To say then you don’t trust a person in so far as they have done wrong is to withdraw at least some love from them. To say withdrawing love from them does not mean you hate them is to lie for to withdraw love is always an act of hate and if you exercise the alternative to hating not caring that is an act of hate itself for it is an act of harm. We cannot loves sinners and hate their sins because if we believe the sinner freely caused the sin then we cannot separate the sinner from the sin. Christianity ridicules sinners and then encourages them. The reason you do not love a sinner but hate them is because you do not trust them for hate proceeds from fear. To claim to love somebody you don’t trust even if you seem to be nice to them makes you devious and conniving and not nice or loving. There is no love without trust for we want people to trust us more than love us. The Atheist solution is that there is no free will so we can hate the disorder that causes evil in a person and love the person and that we can live happily and be better off without believing in the stupid doctrine. The Christian suggestion that only God can make us love sinners and hate their sins is fanaticism – it is putting a theory such as God before real breathing living people. God cannot do the impossible anyway.

The Catholic Church teaches about the law of double-effect. If a woman has an ectopic pregnancy, she has the baby growing in the fallopian tube. The Church says that the tube can be removed even though it causes the death of the baby for the intention is not to kill the baby but to save the mother. This is the law of double-effect. It is saying that the intent is to save the woman and the baby's death is an unintended side-effect.

Surely then they can say that if you try to love the sinner and hate the sin and end up hating that the hate is a side-effect? Double-effect makes a shambles of love the sinner and hate the sin.

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.

"Love the sinner and hate the sin" is a smokescreen. It is needed to make the religious system look innocent if its members start to hate sinners. But as human beings are not basically good, and the Church admits they are not, it is clear that the rule cannot really be put into practice. If it can be, it isn't. We like to do good that will make us fit in the community reasonably well. It is done not because it is good but because it serves our purpose. We like to hate but tend to do it in an underhand way while claiming to hate sins not the people who sin. We can be sure that people are all doing this because it is exactly the kind of hypocrisy they need to form a religious community. It is an essential.