To Like the Sinner is to Like the Sin
 

Love the sinner means to not be angry at him or her or to want to see him or her suffer for sinning. Hate the sin means you have to angrily want their sin to suffer. If you are not angry with the sinner and love him then you must like him. If you are angry with the sin then you must dislike it. But you cannot dislike a moral flaw the same way as you dislike rain. If you really love the sinner you must like the sin. A sin is a moral flaw. Hating the harm sin does to a person is not the same as hating the sin. The harm is a side-effect.
 
Love is not liking (page 75, Ecumenical Jihad). That is what the Catholic Church says. But that teaching does not wash with most people.
 
The Church says that love is doing what is in essence putting another before yourself whether you feel anything for them or not.
 
I define love as not voluntary sacrifice but as feeling pleasure in the well-being of myself and others. Those who say love does not necessarily like are fooling us because you have to at least like a person a tiny hardly detectable bit to be willing to help them in any way. Love is liking. Love then is a feeling. It is valuing yourself and not the other person because you only like them for your own fulfilment and not theirs. Strictly speaking when you say you like them it is really yourself that you like.  Like means you take pleasure. It is about you and how you use them for you. You like only what is in them that reminds you of what you like about yourself. It follows then there is no point in trying to love God for to love him is to put him first and you can’t do that.
 
People prefer to be liked than to be loved. The wife who has a husband who behaves lovingly towards her without emotion will not be happy and will be unable to appreciate him. She would rather she had a man who made mistakes but who liked her a lot.
 
The law given by Jesus saying love your neighbour as yourself is pure hypocrisy. Catholics say that Jesus means that if you can’t like somebody you can still treat them as your equal and work for their wellbeing. They say the command is not about feelings. What would they say if you liked nobody? If nobody liked us all the dry Christian love in the world will do us no good! The Christians undermine our humanity with their command.  Jesus was at the root of that.
 
Your love is meant to help people. How can it do that if it is cold and unfeeling. It won't mean much to them or satisfy them. It makes people see you as deceptive - doing good while despising them. It is doing good for them while depriving them of the warmth they need. It is the warmth from you that will gear them up to looking after themselves better not cold charity. Religion has the nerve to say that wealth does not buy happiness for it attracts many people into your life who want to enjoy your wealth and value it and not you. Yet it teaches that we should do good to people we feel nothing for and expects the recipients to be happy!
 
Love your neighbour as yourself sounds good. It looks good and is one of the principal reasons why the Church never died out ages ago. Expose it and the Church will wither away. It is better to cherish your neighbour because you cherish yourself for all love, meaning liking, starts with self-love. You like yourself and that makes you reach out to help other people for that is part of liking yourself by making friends. All love is self-love.

If you really love your neighbour as yourself which means that you want to make your neighbour as happy as yourself then you have to like her a lot. You will not be of much practical use to your neighbour unless you like her as much as you like yourself.
 
If you dislike your neighbour enough and cannot stand her then it is hardly loving yourself to be kind to her. Jesus who certainly divorced love from liking never had a clue what he was talking about when he commanded that we love all people. That is no surprise for the man was definitely mentally ill if he existed. His doctrines that we could do nothing right unless God helped us to be good and that we are an evil generation plainly suggest we should not like ourselves much and in that case we can’t love or like our neighbour much either. What Jesus and God give with one hand they take away with the other.
 
So back to the Church. The Church must mean that you can love a person you really don’t like when it says that love is not liking. Some say that to love the person you must like the fact that that person is living so you have to like everybody on some level.  That would imply you are not allowed to wish that person had never came into existence. But you can love while feeling nothing for the person at all, end of story, if love is not liking.
 
The Church says that to love God is not to feel love for him but to will what he wills. We can love God while feeling hatred for him. The heart and the will – that part of you that does the choosing – do not always agree. If you love God just to gain some benefit then you don’t love God at all. And if you only help your neighbour because you like him or her a bit or a lot then you don't love them.
 
The Church says there is more love in doing favours for one you dislike intensely than there is for helping one you like. Why? Because there is a greater sacrifice and a greater triumph over evil feelings that try to stop you being kindly. To be less loving than more loving is a sin. It follows that we should like nobody and the more feelings of hatred we bear towards them the better. It is a sin to like being loving for that reduces the value of the sacrifice. The more you dislike God the more you will love him in doing good for it becomes a really difficult sacrifice.
 
Even if we can love the sinner and not love the sin we cannot like the sinner and dislike the sin. Loving sinners means trying to change them not treating them as if their sin doesn’t matter which would be unloving. Liking them is feeling that they are great. If they are sinners they are not great. Liking them is liking their sins too. You don’t mind them doing anyone a disservice as long as it is not you on the receiving end.
 
Religion tries to warm people’s hearts by telling them that God loves them no matter what they do. This is a cunning deception for the people will understand love to mean liking.
 
People go on about looking for love but they mean love as in being liked a great deal. We would rather do without what religion sees as love in order to be liked than to be loved but disliked. If nobody liked us we would be extremely unhappy and maladjusted.
 
Love is selfishness and those who say it is being other-centred are misleading us.

To dislike the sin is to dislike the sinner. To like the sinner and to love the sinner properly you have to applaud their immoral natures even if you despise the harm that may be a side-effect of their actions.
 
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