A RELIGION DOES NOT NEED TO ENCOURAGE HATE BUT TO JUST OIL THE HINGES

The longest lasting and most successful toxic factories in society manage to oil evil's path to success without seeming to be evil and while seeming to detest it. Condemning evil while doing that is underhandedly inspiring evil people who learn from that very condemnation. It is like how you can corrupt a child in the guise of sex education. The evil takes root with nobody seeing it getting in.

Sin is an immoral act forbidden by divine law. It implies you deserve punishment. This is not a helpful idea at all. Sin is a hindrance. So God is a hindrance. And the bigger the emphasis put on God the bigger the hindrance he is. His followers are hindrances. They hinder themselves and hinder others. What matters is not judging a person's actions as immoral or moral. What matters is not judging the person either. What matters is helping the person want to live a better life. To wish punishment on people for sin is worse than wishing it on them for having done harm.
 
An atheist does not believe that hurting another person offends God or offends God's law. The atheist should worry about what the hurting of another says about her or him and what it does to the other person and maybe that person's friends and family. The atheist thinks in terms of hurting others but not in terms of sin - sin is breaking the moral law of God. If atheists hurt another person, they mean to hurt that person. But if believers in God hurt another person, it is not just about what they did to that person. It is about God too and God comes first. So belief makes the intention of the believer to hurt far stronger than the intention of the unbeliever. Faith in God and faith in religion lead to making evil intentions more worthy of condemnation and invent sins which do not exist. It is evil to accuse a person of sinning when we should accuse them of having done wrong - there is a difference that matters hugely. You need proof before you can accuse somebody of a crime against God and that means proving God and that the "sin" be it sex before marriage or whatever really is a sin. Belief in sin and God and religion amplify your wrongful intentions. They make you more evil inside if not outside than you would be if you were an atheist.

To use God as a means of making people live moral lives fails for his hatred of sin means he hates the sinner for if you hate the sin as he requires then you hate the sinner. Why? Because a sin is not what a person does but what a person becomes because the person has to become evil. Doing wrong without meaning to be evil is not sin but becoming evil is sin. A few Christians reject the hypocrisy of loving the bad person and hating their badness. 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 disassociated 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" (page 222, The Doctrine of God, Gerald Bray, IVP, Illinois, 1993). Christianity then should lead to hatred of sinners. If Christians were more coherent in their thinking then it clearly would do that easily and the world would drown in blood.

It is hypocritical to hate somebody’s harmless sin say of homosexuality. Christians say it is not for God will punish the sin. But not necessarily. If the act is harmless it should not be punished. Others say that the sin hurts God which is a lie for God cannot be hurt or harmed. The Church rejects this lie (page 21, The Atonement: Mystery of Reconciliation). So it is ridiculous to say you love somebody who loves his harmless sin while you hate his sin that means so much to him. It is insincere. Christianity and Islam agree that most people prefer to sin than do good which means that the idea of hating sin will inevitably lead the egotists to such revulsion against sinners that they will attack them. This happens all the time when homosexuals are condemned. It gives aggressive people more of an incentive to beat them senseless. In this light, loving the sinner and hating the sin is meaningless for whatever is felt for the sinner it is not love.

It is also a scandal that many religionists do not oppose wrongs like stealing or murder because they harm us but because God forbids them. When you hate theft or murder for a figment of the imagination that is hating other people who could do or who do such things. It is despising them in favour of an article of blind faith namely God. Also to interpret God in accordance with the tenets of a blind faith religion or a religion with insufficient evidence is offensive to him and is closing him out of any chance he has of enabling you of performing the miracle of loving the sinner and hating the sin.
 
When loving the sinner and hating the sin is not possible it follows that there can be no God for he had no justification for making us for our capacity to love was always his only excuse for all the disasters he allows to happen. To say God exists is to automatically say you should love the sinner and hate the sin so the God belief is meant only for hypocrites. To even suggest that God might exist is still endangering human integrity.
 
Real love does not turn into hate. Christianity by saying that doing serious evil is an almighty insult against such a wonderful God, that it deserves everlasting torment in Hell and that it gives others a bad example that could draw them to Hell is making it hard for love not to turn into hate. It would be a betrayal of your friends and loved ones to embrace such a faith. The love will make you suffer. Love shouldn't do that. It should make you happy to help the other person when the other person is going astray or in trouble. Christianity preaches love but then puts barriers in its path. It encourages hypocritical love not real love.
 
Christians say that to love the sinner is to hate the sin and vice versa. Hate the sin and love the sinner means we must judge the sinner fairly and condemn sin when we see it. To not condemn the sin and to judge it is to hate the sinner. Surely then the more sin we see in a person the better and especially if there is a God who deserves perfect service and obedience. Why? If hating the sin is another way of loving the sinner as the Church says, then the more you see a person as a sinner the more you love them. Even if you mistakenly think they are worse than they are that is brilliant. That the Church does not draw this conclusion is proof that it knows fine well that to hate the sin is to want to maliciously hurt the sinner.
 
God by definition is the only thing that matters. An all-perfect being needs to be given the only place in the heart never mind the first place. To give a place to any creature including yourself would be to refuse him the adoration he is entitled to just because of what he is. Believers in God have to treat belief in God not a belief but as knowledge. You will always hold something back from God in you only have faith in him for faith is not certainty. So believers say that their faith is a form of mystical knowledge. Such a notion makes a precedent for religious fanaticism. Islam is one religion that claims to give knowledge of what God is like and this knowledge is in the Koran. Christianity has a different version of what God is like and what he wants. If faith in a religion is knowledge then it follows that if your religion urges you to execute gay people then you must do it. Strangely, Christianity says that faith is knowledge and then contradicts this by saying God does miracles as signs. If you know in your heart that the faith is true then what do you need signs for? Are the signs only for the unbelievers? But it is only those who have already decided that miracles are signs - have faith already - that regard miracles as signs.
 
FINALLY

How do you grease the slide into evil?  God?  Faith?  Religion?  Prayer?  Condemning sin?  All of these work.  They are bad enough on their own but trying to see exactly what harm is done is like trying to count the feathers in you pillow after you rip it open in a gale.
 
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

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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