HATE FOR SIN IS PERSONAL
How love sinner hate sin is a ploy to avoid admitting your feelings against
sinners are something personal
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, does not mean you cannot be stirring up love of violence in
you. It means you are stirring it up because stirring up such emotions is
irrational anyway.
Christianity shouts, "Love the sinner and detest the sin!" the loudest. Hate
means to dislike intensely and with violence of emotion, not necessarily action.
Religion commands hating the sin. If we do this then it is really treating sin
like a thing. To hate a thing like sin is irrational. You cannot hate a thing
and be rational. When we hate a thing, it is because an irrational emotion has
kicked in. The hate is emotional but it is not us being truly ourselves. Proper
hate involves and necessitates us being truly ourselves. Religion warns that you
can hate the sinner and imagine you hate the sin not the sinner. It admits that
anything can be counterfeited and warns us that our hearts can fool us.
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. It puts the sinner at the risk of
suffering at your hands. Or perhaps you will give at least passive support by
silence if other people hurt her or him. Love the sinner and hate the sin could
be the principle that is behind our tendency to be kind to people while at the
same time being absolutely delighted should somebody hurt them and inflict
misfortune on them. We hate them but are too smug and keen on looking good but
not on being good in reality to actually make that hate obvious and put it into
violent action.
When somebody hates your sin you can be sure that it is you they really hate. We
all know that to hate sin is personal for it feels personal. If you really
separate the sin from the sinner you will feel about the sin the same way as you
would the book that falls on your head. But you know it feels personal.
Christianity calls on you to lie to be a Christian by pretending that it
doesn’t. You don’t forgive the book for falling on you for it is not a person.
You don’t resent the book. If a person dropped the book on you for spite you
would resent the person. You cannot forgive the sinner unless you hate them
first at least a little bit. Christianity offers only pretend forgiveness which
is why it never lasts and never takes away the resentment which soon explodes in
religious bigotry or some other form.
Religion argues, "Cancer isn’t bad. It is just something that is living and
growing in the wrong place. It’s the place that is wrong not the cancer for life
and growth are good. Therefore you cannot hate cancer. You hate its consequences
but not the cancer. You don’t have anything personal against the cancer or its
wrongness." The hater of sin does not hate the consequences of the sin only but
the sin itself. The consequences are not the sin - and it is a fact that if bad
things happen to you following your sin it does not follow that your sin is to
blame for all of it. The hater of sin hates it as a needless deliberate
punishable evil. Her or she hates the person that chose to do the evil for sin
is essentially an evil choice. It is personal. If you really loved the sinner
you wouldn’t be able to have a personal hatred of the sin.
Compassion for the sinner and not the sin makes no sense. It means you have
compassion for the sin and hardness of heart and coldness towards the sin as if
it were a person. It is not the sin that is getting the hardness and coldness
but the person. Compassion for the sinner is extremely patronising and unloving.
Compassion is only due to people who experience misfortune that is not their own
fault or who seek and need help now even if it was their fault for they cannot
change the past. It can only be given to people who are afflicted with evils
that they cannot stop. Can you have compassion for an intelligent man who goes
to an exam and deliberately messes it up? Compassion for sinners insults them by
saying it was not their own fault. If it is not their own fault then they are
not sinners and so what is the compassion all about? Who would want compassion
from people who act as if they couldn't help sinning? Christianity is pure
hypocrisy and is pretending to feel a compassion it does not feel at all.
The advice hate the sin and love the sinner demands that you don't hate the
person to any degree at all which is impossible if you hate the sin. So it
condemns you as bad. It brings turmoil on you. It is turning anger into
yourself. It makes you a time bomb. To hate outright would possibly result in
less harm overall.
Nothing can be more ridiculous than saying you trust the sinner but not the
sinner’s sins. It is the sinner you mistrust not the sins. How can you mistrust
sins? They are not people or robots. Mistrust here is a personal feeling and
verdict, it can only be personal and involve persons.
To succeed in being angry at the sin and not the sinner would actually show you
have damaged yourself psychologically. That could lead to you becoming a danger
to perceived sinners as you are not well in the mind and you are trying to make
yourself worse. To love a sinner by making yourself ill is a strange kind of
love. If you would do that to yourself it's only a short step towards starting to
do it to others.
Hatred is a form of warped love. That is why indifference, not giving a toss
about a person if they live or die or are happy or not, is the real opposite of
love. The person who hates you hates you because of something you support or are
a part of or do. They do not hate you because you are a person. They attack you
and are angry at you because of something else. There is no difference between
this and loving the sinner and hating the sin.
Nobody feels loved when somebody claims to hate their sin and to love them. If
you oppose the sin like you oppose a mistake, the person could feel loved but
that is not hating the sin. In hatred for the sin you are asked to hate sin not
just oppose it. It feels like personal hatred or hatred for the person.
With the love the sinner and hate sin ideology, it is no wonder some people are
conditioned to swallow the lie, "I only hurt you because I was taking my
problems out on you. It was not personal! Love me for I don't hate you and
consider me separate from what I did to you for it was not about hurting you."
People have to suffer and be manipulated because religious believers want to
maintain their hypocritical pleasures and holy standing!
The madness of love the sinner and hate the sin shows the power of religious
manipulation and conditioning. When the conditioning is that strong and that
dangerous, religion should be opposed as full of harmful potential.
Do you love your father when he does acts of great evil? It is possible to feel
both love and hate for a person. It is possible to treat them deliberately badly
out of love. When people say they love their evil children but hate their sins
what they really mean is that they love and hate them at the same time. It is
not the sins they hate but them. To hate the sin is always to hate the sinner
even if there is a part of you that loves them. The advice hate the sin and love
the sinner demands that you don't hate the person to any degree at all. All that
does is screw up the relationships. Many of us do great good because we both
love and hate our families and friends. The gentle soul is the one that will let
a friend throw her life down the drain.
If you dislike a person's sin, they will take it personally. They will be hurt
when you hate their sins. Do not bully them into feeling any different by
saying, "You cannot have the right to take it so personally, I hate your sin not
you." That only makes it worse.
Love is not liking. The difference is this, love is doing whatever is needed for
the wellbeing of another. Liking is about feeing good towards another person and
you can like a person and not help them.
You cannot like the sinner and dislike their sin then how can you love the
sinner and hate the sin? If you dislike the sin and you still like the sinner as
much as ever then it follows that you don't dislike the fact that they committed
the sin but that the sin had unpleasant results. So it is not the sin at all you
dislike. The sin is not an action or the results of sin but something that a
person becomes. To dislike or hate the sin is to dislike or hate the sinner.
If you love yourself and hate your sins how can you feel angry or guilty or have
any motivation to correct yourself when you are declaring that your sins are
separate from you and have nothing to do with you? There are believers who feel
free to sin believing Jesus doesn't condemn them but condemns their sins so they
don't worry about the sins and leave it to him to do that. They are an example
of people who use a scapegoat to dump their sins on.
Suppose you are not supposed to hate sin and sinner alike but you do. That is a
sin. If you are to treat others as you would be treated - and Jesus said you are
- then you are to go into denial about how you hate the sin and the sinner
alike.
The hatred in one who pretends he doesn't hate is far worse than the hatred in
one who admits it.
If somebody says they are a fool, you know this is not true. They are not summed
up by any mistake they make or any wrong they do. But if you believe in sin that
deserves and takes you to the everlasting punishment of Hell, mortal sin, then
clearly you are to be summed up by your mortal sin. No wonder the Church says
that if you commit a mortal sin of say masturbation and do not repent all the
good you do will bring you no merit before God. He will not reward it for he
sees it as you trying to be good on your terms not his. Mortal sin and hate go
together.
Bizarrely, the world considers it great and noble to say, "He attacked me. But I
would rather it was done to me than be the attacker". In other words, immorality
is fine as long as it is not me who is doing it. Rather him degrading himself
than me! It is another example of the hypocrisy of altruism.
If somebody writes a letter and asks you what you think of it and you say it is
a disgrace and rubbish and rude. The person will say you are accusing him or her
of being a disgrace and rubbish and rude. After all he or she knows that if you
uphold love the sinner and hate the sin you see her or him as a sinner. The
person will feel that your attack is personal. And the person will be angered.
The person will not accept your excuse, "But I didn't say it about you but about
the letter." The person knows that it is his or her choices in producing the
letter that are called disgrace and rubbish and rude so it is him or her who is
being attacked. The attack might look indirect but it is actually direct. His or
her choices are being attacked. The wording you deployed makes it look indirect
but the meaning shows it is direct.
If you maintain you love the sinner all you do is fuel the sinner's rage for he
or she feels pressured to pretend that you tell the truth when knowing that you
do not. You provoke the person to hate and anger while hiding the provocation.
Because it is hidden you are telling him to pretend there is no hatred or anger
aroused in him. You rig it to get him to subliminate them or suppress them so
that they will eat at him and cause ill health and ignite temper and violence
outbursts. Love the sinner and hate the sin is a manifesto of passive
aggression. The sinner will be mad at your hypocrisy - and if he is to believe
in love the sinner and hate the sin, the sinner has to subliminate and try to
repress that hate to the point that he cannot see it is there though it is
there. An angry sinner is bad enough without you banning him from admitting his
anger is there and is part of him which will only make it worse. Love the sinner
and hate the sin only fuels the fire of hate.
What of you then the critic of the letter who hides a direct attack on the
writer under the guise of hating the actions or condemning? You are a hypocrite.
When you are on the receiving end of what you did to him you will learn a lot.
You will make yourself a person riddled with grudges but who pretends that the
grudges are against what people have done not what they are. When the writer of
the letter accuses you of attacking her or him personally, you will accuse her
of him of another sin - of not believing in loving the sinner and hate the sin.
For believers, not believing that is the ultimate sin.
Love the person and condemn the action ruins your trust in morality and in
others for it is hypocrisy. When your trust is ruined, hate will come to you so
easily and naturally.
This tells us that we cannot ever understand how far from God and good evil is.
Any view of evil we have will be watered down. It may not feel that way but it
is. We cannot care the way God cares. Our caring for another no matter how deep
is idolatrous for it is a mere imitation of how God cares. Thus if we hate sins
it will never be the same as how God hates it. Our hate for sin masks hate for
the sinner. Even if loving sinners and hating sins is achievable for God, we
should be sceptical of humans who claim to do it. And especially so if it is
achievable for God!
There is no doubt that if we think about what the principle of loving sinners
and opposing their sins does that its incoherence becomes plain. We know by
instinct that the principle is a lie. Trying to delude ourselves that
Christianity with its hatred of sin is true cannot paper over this instinct.
Love the sinner and hate the sin is personal and hates the sinner. Admitting it
opens the door to finding a solution for the hate and the misery it causes.
Denying it only makes it worse and is an oblique way of increasing the danger to
others posed by your hate of them for their sins.
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