Catholicism cannot be trusted when it claims to love the sinner despite finding the sin disgusting and repulsive and hateful. It has a record of lying. Let us prove this. The Church has even started saying that to say that the homosexual desire is a disorder is not to say that homosexuals have a disorder! Or that homosexuality is a disorder but homosexuals are not disordered. This is gross hypocrisy and it is only spouted to save the Church from recriminations for preaching hate. If homosexuality is a sickness or a disorder, then homosexuals are sick. End of. Sin is more personal than sickness. A sickness happens to you but a sin is something you cause to happen. Therefore if sin is evil then the sinner is evil. The sin cannot be separated from the sinner. If having a sickness means you are sick then how much more does having a sin mean that you are sinful, that the sin is your bad character or bad nature?
If you told a black person you loved them but you hated their skin colour it would be rightly disbelieved that you really love them. A sin or evil character is more personal than skin colour so you hate the sinner if you say you hate the sin.
Hatred is made up of fear, anger and the spiteful desire to injure or destroy.
If you do not fear something you cannot hate it.
Anger is the dislike and emotional pain you feel at the thought of something being done wrong that makes you want to react and stop the perceived evil. Anger is said to be not necessarily spiteful. But it can be.
The spiteful desire to injure or destroy means that you don't care about right and wrong - you want to destroy or hurt whatever it is that is injuring you.
Jesus Christ and the Christian Church command that we must hate sin. When we see others sinning we are supposed to fear, be angry and set out and stop the sin - we are supposed to hate it.
But they command us to love sinners. The solution they give is the unhelpful, Love the sinner and hate the sin. It is unhelpful for it is contradictory. It is pretending that the sin and the sinner can be separated - they cannot. To hurt one is to hurt the other. To dislike one is to dislike the other.
Love the sinner and hate the sin is three commands in one. Here they are.
1 Do not fear the sinner but fear the sin.
2 Do not be angry with the sinner but the sin.
3 Do not wish to spitefully destroy or injure the sinner but to spitefully destroy and injure the sin.
All you have to do is see that the commandment is really these three and they are so absurd that you know then that those who claim to be doing a good turn by commanding the love of sinners and the hatred of sins are lying hypocrites. The main ingredient of hatred, anger and spite is fear. That is the rock they are built on. So number one is the main one and it teaches the biggest absurdity of all: Fear the sin but not the sinner! Preaching such a ridiculous thing is on the face of it is as insane as claiming to be God himself!
Can we be vindictive towards a sin like it were not the sinner? To be vindictive against a thing is to work up the filthy side of your nature. Being vindictive is vindictive whether it is a person or thing you direct your spiteful feelings at. If you can manage to be vindictive towards a sin like it was a thing then some interesting conclusions arise. If you are vindictive towards a thing you are being vindictive towards yourself by inflicting your spiteful feelings on yourself over something that is not even alive or deliberately dong wrong. To be angry with it and to fear it when it is only a thing is irrational and self-abuse too. Treat yourself like that and you will soon be treating sinners like Hitler treated the Jews and still pretending you do it out of love for them. If you can feel such hatred for a thing or a sin what would you not feel for bad people? To love the sinner and hate the sin you have to hate yourself. And if you do that you will soon hate everybody. Jesus advocated self-hatred when he said that loving God above all matters more than loving yourself and said that if you do all God commands you must still consider yourself to be useless.
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.
The love sinner and hate sin commandment is based on mistrust of people. It is used by those who wish to condition people to imagine that they can love the sinner and hate the sin. It doesn't trust these people to let them have the truth. It is not based on charity for the innocent but on mistrust of the innocent. It is not motivated by love. It seeks to trap people in the same hypocrisy as the following. A whore in Christianity is a woman who gives her sex for money or for nothing and outside the boundaries of Christian marriage . If she gives it for free she is the worst whore of all. Yet the Christians claim the right to say to a woman, "We love you so we have to tell you the truth. You have demeaned yourself and God by having sex with this man when you are not married to him." If they just say, "You are a whore!" there will be outrage. But if they just say she did things that fit the definition of a whore there is no problem! Love the sinner would imply you love her by not calling her a whore. Hate the sin implies that you say she does whatever you can find in the dictionary beside the word whore. But there is no real difference at all. The only difference is in the conditioned imagination and emotions of the parties concerned. And that is not a difference at all but an illusion.
Jesus Christ exhibited a loud and vehement and brain bursting hatred of sin. He rioted in the Temple because of the buyers and sellers trading there making his Father's house a supermarket. He said that it is better to lose a body part than to sin with it and be condemned to Hell where you pay for your sin for all eternity. He ranted at the respected Jewish priests and the Scribes and the Pharisees openly calling them bastards and hypocrites to their faces (Matthew 23). The Old and New Testaments have many statements from God declaring that sin is an abomination - homosexuality is an abomination according to God though even if it is a sin it is not the worst. The vast majority of us have enemies who hate us but who do not fulminate against us and attack us with the vehemence displayed by Jesus towards his enemies in the gospels and that of the God of the Old Testament against the enemies of Israel. If they love us, we would hate to think what they would be like if they hated us! It is clear from the Bible then that you can hate people as much as you like and treat them as if you hate them and still claim that you love the sinner and hate the sin. You act like you hate the sinner and you can pretend that it is the sin you hate. The love the sinner and hate the sin command doesn't help at all. It is just words. Jesus proved his own hypocrisy if he taught us to love sinners and hate sins. He and Christianity pretend that they want to help. By advocating intolerance for sin, Jesus was advocating a hatred that surpasses that of the local vandals may have for society. He tried to give you a way to hate people more than you should or want to and still claim to be righteous.
We judge if somebody hates you by what they may say or think of you. If somebody says with emotion that you are a very bad person we justly conclude that the person hates you. The love sinner and hate sin idea tries to make it impossible to tell if anybody hates you. If you could love the sinner and hate the sin there would be no way to tell and to accuse anybody of hating would be vindictive. Islam and Christianity teach that the person who sins by scandal and bad example draws others closer to the Hell of everlasting punishment - so they accuse the person of being very very bad indeed, indeed totally bad and evil, even if that person is likeable and decent enough. If that is not hatred and/or incitement to hatred then what is? Why bother condemning hate at all when you have doctrines like that? Religion says we must forgive to be free. But if we have to hate the sin and even if not the sinner we will never be free. So why bother? The forgiveness is really just about condoning the sin. Jesus evilly commanded that we must forgive seventy times seven a day while teaching fear of the evil generation under the power of the Devil, teaching intense hatred of sin and teaching that death and endless Hell are retribution for sin so his intention was not to make us free. Forgiving to be free must be a sin. You must do it because God commands it - this follows from the teaching of Jesus that we must love God more than ourselves or our neighbour.
Love the sinner and hate the sin is bad enough. But if you believe that sin deserves or puts people at risk of everlasting torment then the hatred will be overpowering. It makes the hatred due to sin worse.
If you love the sinner and hate the sin and they are separate then it follows that you must forgive the sinner but continue hating the sin. You can forgive the sinner but not forgive the sin. Christians will say that the more you love the person the more you will hate their sins that they commit now and the sins that they have committed in the past and even those they have been forgiven. So you love those sinners by hating their sins even if those sinners are forgiven.
Jesus spoke of the awesome power of Satan. He spoke of his generation being influenced by Satan and St Paul called Satan the god of the world. He implied that unbelievers were being guided by Satan. Since Satan wants man to destroy man and all to go to Hell for all eternity failing to hate those who collaborate with him would be impossible. If they don't know they are pawns of Satan, they should try to find out so they are still to blame. Those who work with Satan are worse than he is for he has to depend on man to destroy man and on man to encourage man to reject God and salvation.
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 will 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.
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 just love the person the same? If 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, then the sinner should be loved more because you hate the sin. 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 then you hate the sinner with the sin. If you love the sinner the same
You go to the therapist. The therapist helps you see that you are the cause of your problems. The therapist will claim to be non-judgemental. But if you do bad things to yourself you are bad. So they are judging you but pretending they don't. If they are non-judgmental they will be thinking that your evil is really good or at least not bad - in other words that it is just too good for you. This example is another evidence of the lies involved in claiming to hate the sin and love the sinner. "You are responsible for this mess but I don't judge" is a contradiction just the same. It is a proud boastful lie to say you can do what is not rationally possible and which most people see and feel is impossible.
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!
Love the sinner and hate the sin claims to be a recipe for humility. By loving the sinner you are supposed to avoid pridefully hating the sinner when you are a sinner yourself. Curiously, if Jesus has taken over your sins and had them credited to his account by dying on the cross to be punished for them by God then it follows that you are no longer really a sinner if you are a Christian and CAN look down on sinners. For you, your sinful past is now a fiction because of Jesus. Christians surely must believe that people with mental impairments that prevent them from sin have the right to hate sinners.
Christian humility is false. It is really pride in disguise. You can't believe in humility unless you pridefully believe you have the wisdom to see you should believe. If the humility didn't make you happy in some way you would not be engaging in it. You believe you are worthy of happiness which is a form of pride. Christians say it is a great thing to be humble and holy and kind in private and to hide it from others if possible. So it is bad to be humble for the sake of wanting others to see it. That is pride. The Church will say that justifying this on the basis that others need to see your humility is a subtle form of selfishness and pride. The Church warns that subtle pride is more dangerous than open brazen pride for it is harder to diagnose and more sneaky and deceptive. Letting others see you cannot make you proud. It is only what you think of you that can do that. So there is more pride in YOU seeing your humility than in others seeing it. And surely God seeing how humble you are can be more pride for you than others seeing it? Others only see the outside but God sees the humility you hope is in your heart. Belief in God then is terrific for those who want to enjoy false humility. It is great if you want the benefits of pride and being thought and feeling humble while not being really humble. That way you are getting the best out of pride. Christianity is not based on God. It is based on self. It is not surprising then that Christians and Jews and Muslims spew so much hatred against debunkers of their faiths a hatred that does not exist say in Buddhists or Taoists when their faiths are criticised.
Christians and secularists are at war. The reason for the war all comes down to something very simple. Christians claim that God created them and revealed their religion. Secularists claim that Christians created their version of God and their religion. The Christians say that they are right for God told them what is right and he knows best. The secularists are saying that Christians are inventing their faith and should not be permitted to enforce their ideas on society not even legally. Secularism should listen to religion but as one thing among many things that should be given a hearing. Secularism is not perfect and nobody should claim that it is. But to try and judge what should be allowed or not allowed without religious prejudices and taboos is better than letting religions rule the day with all their different rules and lies and infighting and confusion. For example, if a secularist has to work out if contraception is good or bad or neutral he or she should do it on earthly grounds and not be worrying about the command of a religion requiring her or him to forbid contraception. Nothing will get done if we start complicating things with religion. It is not intolerance but necessity that requires the secular voice to be the loud voice and the voice that is heard. We need to forget about God and religious taboos and work out what is best for society.
Remember, the following is hypothetical: If there was any hope of loving the sinner and hating the sin, it would follow that the more certain you are that an act in question is sinful then the more you can love the sinner. That is because the more you doubt or are unsure that the act is sinful, the more you intend an injustice and intend hatred for the person. Nobody would believe you if you accused somebody of a sin on very little evidence and maintained that you loved that person. So the person who has strong evidence that x is doing wrong loves x more than the person who has less evidence that x is doing wrong. The love would only be complete if there was absolute proof that x was doing wrong.
Religion is full of rules it cannot prove. Who can prove that it is wrong to miss Mass on Sunday? Who can prove that it is wrong to let a day pass by without praying? Who can prove that artificial birth control is a sin? Who can prove that it is sinful to believe that a freshly fertilised egg is not a human person with as many rights as a grown up human person? Who can prove that it is sinful to disagree with Jesus who said that whoever doesn't believe in him and all he says is condemned by God? The more rules there are, the more the claim to love the sinner can be doubted. Against psychology, Roman Catholicism says that if you commit a mortal sin you are completely opposing God - if that were true such sinners would not be praying for the grace of repentance! And it is said to be immoral to disagree with the Church! It is best to have as few rules as possible and to have only well-authenticated ones. Religion puts more blocks in the way of loving the sinner as if there are not enough already.
Christianity gives no proof that its faith is the true faith. It says God does miracles to verify the faith. But if the faith was good and was sensible and the alternatives bad then God doing miracles is really a sign of his failure to teach it properly and provide for its accurate dissemination.
Religion counsels us to hate the sin but love the sinner. This is absurd as saying, "I disapprove of the sin but not the sinner". It is as absurd as saying, "I disapprove of the sin but not the action." And as absurd and two-faced as, "Hate the sinner and love the person".
You may reply that you mean, "I disapprove of the wrongdoing and of the sinner as far as he or she is a sinner but there is so much I approve of so I am not against the person." You are against the person a bit. What you say is admitting that you hate and disapprove of the person who has hardly any good qualities. If you mean what you say you mean, then you are failing to love the sinner and hate the sin.
Christianity teaches that sin deserves to be hated. To say you love the sinner and hate their sin is simply to say that the sin deserves to be punished and hated but the sinner doesn't which makes no sense. The rule is not practical, not helpful, and not honest. It is bad enough for unbelievers and atheists to accept the rule but for god believers to attribute the rule to God and say God keeps it is extreme blasphemy. It is like saying that it is a sin to drink the blood of babies and then to allege that God wants it drunk. They say there is no love of neighbour unless you love God above all things first. They ridicule God and disguise it as reverence so belief in God makes them hate sinners more not less.
If sin deserves to be hated then the person committing it deserves to be hated. It is only people that can deserve things. To say sin deserves to be hated is to urge people to hate the sinner. Criminal law needs to recognise that Christianity, Judaism and Islam are inciting to hatred and violence and deal with them accordingly.
The Church admits that our inclination is to hate the sin and the sinner together. It says that loving the sinner and hating the sin can only be done with the help of God and it often takes a long struggle. Isn't it fanaticism to teach a doctrine that we must hate sin when it leads so many to hate the sinner? Isn't it fanatical to excuse this by saying there may be a supernatural power to help? Is this any different in principle from the man who jumps from the temple believing that angels will save him and if they don't then it was their will for him to die or cripple himself so he is not doing wrong? Our love for the sinner would be a grudging love. We might as well not bother! If we forgive the sinner because God won't be pleased if we don't or because we wish not to be eaten up by hate, isn't this forgiveness grudging? We only give it not because we want to do good for the one who has hurt us but for other reasons so it is grudging. It is unforgiveness wrapped up in the guise of forgiveness.
Jesus' teaching that we must love enemies and hate their sins means that we are to pretend that when we hate people that it is their sins and not them that we hate and when we find we hate them we are to feel guilty and seek repentance. That teaching is not guidance, it is continual mental and spiritual torment.
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.
If the sinner and the sin are so separate then how can it be wrong to talk about what evil a person who is respected now did decades ago? The rule destroys the credibility of moral systems.
The believer needs the rule more than an unbeliever might. The believer needs to promote a God who loves sinners and hates sins. This implies that since the rule is bad, anything that increases any excuse to have the rule or the "need" to have the rule is just disgusting.
Love the sinner and hate the sin condemns the victim of evil for hating the sinner. It plainly sides with the evildoer in a way against the victim. It urges the victim to hate the sin though it will mean hating the sinner and then the victim gets condemned for doing it. It is a religious kind of assault on the victim.
Love the sinner and hate the sin is not very helpful at all. It is like telling somebody to be good and not explaining what being good is. It is not meant to help but to cast a veneer of decency over the Christians. Some people claim to hate the sin and not the sinner and they make the sinner's life a misery. You can imagine the other extreme. Suppose Christians say they hate the sin of homosexuality. They might still campaign for gay rights say to marriage and adoption. They could say they are doing it for the persons and not for the sin.
Sin is not an entity but a person. Our language makes a difference between sinner and sin but there isn't. To say that there is blue and there is a blue ball does not mean that the blue and the ball in one way are not the same thing.
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. It can only be given to such. 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.
Religion warns that hatred of sin easily becomes hatred of the sinner. Logically, the more you hate sin the more easily you might hate the sinner and be in denial. The more you hate the sin the more likely you are to be a danger to the sinner and hate the sinner.
Jesus said in Matthew 5 right at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount that if your eye makes you lust for a woman and lust is a sin that you must hate the sin of lust so much that you would gouge the eye out. Some take him literally but all agree that whatever he meant he was commanding an intense hatred for sin. We know that when we hate sin we cannot leave the person out for sins don't happen on their own. They are what people do and they reflect and reveal the kind of persons they are, whether they are bad or good people. To advocate hatred of sin is to advocate hatred of the sinner. The person is the sin in a real sense. The more people want you to hate sin the more they put you at risk of hating the sinner even if the sinner can sometimes be loved and his sin hated. To advocate extreme abhorrence for sin as Jesus did is advocating hatred of the sinner and leading to it. He said that if you
Loving the sinner and hating the sin is the advice that the Church gives. It is false advice for it cannot be done. Can you trust the sinner and not the sin? Can you punish the sin and not the sinner? Can you curse the sin and not the sinner? Can you ostracise the sinner and not the sin? Christians are fully aware of the hypocrisy - they don't believe anybody who tells them they hate their Christianity but love them. Christians call to hate. They demand that you hate and then do the additional evil of lying about it that it is really love you do.
To ask one to hate sin is to ask one to hate sinners. To also ask one to love sinners is asking one to pretend to love. The Church boasts that it can love the sinner and hate the sin. Its a lying boast and the Church even goes as far as to say that it is an extreme sin to doubt that loving sinners and hating sin is possible. Its doctrine is based on self-righteous pride. The Church hates and maligns those who see the deceit of loving sinners and hating sin. To say that John does bad, whether he is deliberately bad or not, is to say that if bad is hateful then John is hateful. If bad is not hateful then why counsel to hate sin?
If you are obligated to hate the sins you see and love the sinners that is an awful lot of pressure for you. You see so much sin that it will be a great source of stress. You will soon lose the energy to love. You will find your self-esteem in tatters for you will be struggling uphill and continuously falling back. When that happens you will be hating the sinner with the sin in no time! Hate the sin and love the sinner almost translates as, "Hate your own guts and make your life a misery."
To hate the sin and to love the sinner makes out that there is a distinction without a difference. It is like saying, "I hate your Christianity but admire your religious notions." "I oppose everything about you and everything that you do but I don't oppose you." "I am glad you are alive but I am opposed to the fact that you are breathing."
Christians love sinners so much that they tar somebody who takes revenge on an evil person with the same brush as the evil person. If a woman cuts up her cheating husband's clothing the Church nods and says she came down to his level. She hit back at a bad man. He made dirt of a good woman. There is a huge difference.
Religion absurdly pontificates, "We must judge the sin not the sinner." Why? The answer usually give is that it is selfless and self-sacrificing and loving to show great kindness to those who hate you and who are conspiring against you or those who don't deserve it. But in abusive relationships what happens is this. When the man verbally abuses the woman and tells her that she is ugly, fat and how dissatisfied he is with her or hits her he will say something along the lines of, “I don’t want to hurt you but I do but you know I love you.” In other words, “I am a good person who does bad things,” which is the same as, “Love me even if you hate the bad things I do.” We know how bad it is for the woman to believe him.
The Church believes in more sins than society does. Society does not for instance consider white lies and contraception to be sinful. The Church does. The Church regards such things as opposition to any public displays of faith, missing Mass and doubting the veracity of the Bible as sinful. Society does not. When an organisation is lying about loving the sinner and hating the sin and then invents more sins than we need to believe in, that organisation is evil. It is a hate group despite all the whitewash it smears over itself. For an unbeliever, to hurt another person is just to do wrong against that person. For a believer, it is also to do wrong against God and God is thought to be even more important than any person so wronging God is the worst part of any sin. Belief in God deepens the evil and hypocrisy of love the sinner and hate the sin. We should get rid of belief in God for we don't need anything to make what is bad worse. God says in the Bible that he is a jealous God and can't tolerate anything that contradicts him being put first. He wants us to be jealous for him.
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.
Forgiving the sin means that you are wiping the slate clean and relegating the sin to the past. It is in the past and not to be treated as existent any more. It is not loving the sinner and hating the sin. You can't put the sin in the past and go on hating it. It is persons you forgive not sins. Strictly speaking that is the case.
You can only love a person in so far as you trust them. Love for another is caused by trusting that
person. Therefore if you say you love
the sinner but not her or his sins then you are lying for by saying they are
their sins you are saying you don’t trust them in those things. It is clear then that if you see a person as
a sinner or yourself as a sinner then in so far as you see this in so far do
you hate them and yourself. Not being
trusted hurts. If you don’t trust a
person you will wish their endeavours will go wrong for them and you may do or
think you should do things to stop them doing the things you dislike. The employee who is not trusted will lose the
job and suffer. 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.
If Christians really can love the sinner but hate the sin then why do they
get so angry when they themselves are criticised? Why don’t they tell themselves that the sin
is what is being attacked and not them?
Because they know that they are being attacked when the sin is attacked.
If we love the sinner and hate the sin then it does not matter if we are
accused in the wrong for the sin is to be treated as a separate entity from
us. If sin is separate from you then it
is not your problem if it is attacked and condemned even unjustly. And if we are condemned for something we did
do then is the act that is insulted and degraded not us and since it is a bad
act we should not care. God should not
have issued the commandment: “You shall not bear false witness against thy
neighbour”. That we are urged to love
the sinner and hate the sin is terrible because none of us feels it is true or
believes it and all we end up becoming is hypocrites. We are persecuted by being made to feel
guilty if we do not comply so the rule neither loves the sinner or hates sin
and it abuses and loathes the saint as well as the sinner.
The love the sinner hate the sin philosophy plainly implies: “I do not
love you except in so far as I want you to become good like me”. If that is love then the word love has no
definition but is nonsense and such an attitude is prideful in the extreme.
Nobody wants to be loved just for their good side and as if they had no
bad side for that is not really accepting them.
There is no love without acceptance.
Gay people and women who have had abortions and others who are persecuted
by those who believe in God are often not blamed for throwing back the “We love
you but hate your sin” message in the faces of those who patronise them with
it. Those who use the adage are only parading
their own superior virtue. It translates
as, “I am good for loving you but you are a bad sinner. I am so great that I can love you despite
your sins”. This comes out all the
clearer when the lovers claim to be sinners themselves. Bad trees bear bad fruit. Sinners cannot do real loving acts.
We do not love persons but our perception of them. We love them not as they are but the way we
see them. This is a fact of life. To love the sinner then would mean that we
have to perceive them as good to love them.
But then we cannot hate the sin so we have to forget the sin. The commandment actually suggests there is no
such thing as right and wrong and its opposition to sin is just another dose of
spiritual schizophrenia or hypocrisy or both.
All it can do is encourage cruelty and hatred and power-grabbing and
lying. When it is your perception of the
person that you love not the real person then it is your perception of their
acts as sins that you hate. You choose
if you have free will to perceive that sins have occurred and they will not be
happy about that or feel loved for that is like deciding to select the worst
interpretation of their actions.
Believers in God say we must love the sinner and hate the sin for we are
all sinners. This is dishonest because
if you say John’s essay is stupid that is the same as calling John stupid
though many pretend it is not. If to
call John clever is to say John is clever that means to call John stupid is to
say John is stupid. Religion does this
which shows it is wilful dishonesty and false charm. This makes altruism impossible for it is
meant to be free from lies but this bases it on lies. So egoism (the idea that you must find
happiness in respecting yourself and others and in this sense selfishness is
right) is the only option. It is bad enough
to be an unbeliever and promote the lie of loving wrongdoers and hating wrong
but it is worse to say that God does the same, to blacken the being you say is
all good. Despite all its “love” for
God, God-religion is intrinsically blasphemous and deepens vice. The atheist will have the best hope of
entering the
What could be more ridiculous and two-faced than holding that
homosexuality is objectively disordered or sick but this is not holding
homosexuals to be disordered as the
If we are to love the sinner and hate the sin that means we are to love
the sin for it is not the bad act we hate but what the person has become in
doing the act. The sin becomes the
person as it were. Loving the sinner
will come before hating the sin and is more important so the sin will be
treated as unimportant or even nice. For
these two reasons the sin is loved.
Altruism cannot condone this so altruism has to be rejected.
If God should be loved first of all, above all things, that follows that
hating the sin is more important for 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.
To love the sinner and not the sin is to separate the two. It is totally foolish to say you hate
somebody’s sin but not them because how could you hate something that is
separate from them? It is only a thing
and what is the point of hating a thing?
Its only a thing and has no will of its own. What would be the point of hating the fact
that it is raining in
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.
What good is praise if people cannot judge you as a sinner and condemn you? Praise presupposes that you can be condemned and should be when you do wrong. Praising somebody who you choose to see as good and pretend that the sins belong to something outside the doer of the sin is hollow. They would be stupid if they took any contentment in it. So to love sinners and hate sins the chief victim has to be the person who does good. So the rule results in this: “Sinners are pretended to be loved for they are punished and lied to as a reward for repenting and doing good.”
The love sinner hate sin idea commands that you must always hate sin in others. It claims that you don't really love the sinner unless you are sternly opposed to sin. It won't be easy keeping a marriage going with that kind of attitude. The idea demands that you hate sin or you don't love the person in reality. If hating the sin is hating the sinner then this love is pretend. Even Hitler could say that he loved the Jews for he didn't want them to be Jews and that it was Jewishness not Jews he intended to hurt. As with love sinner and hate sin it is a distinction without a difference. 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.
If 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.
The Handbook of Christian Apologetics states that it is true that we cannot avoid being Pharisees when we go on about right and wrong and cannot hate sins without hating the sinners (page 127). Strangely, it conflicts with Christian teaching in saying that to hate evil is to give in to evil and become evil and negative. The reason it says this is that hating evil can make us hard and cruel just like hating a sinner can. But they are not suggesting we should not care about sin or love it for that would be worse than hating sin in their opinion. So they do want us to hate sin as the lesser evil. And they would say that if you really hate sin, you will hate it because you love the sinner so no matter how much you hate sin and how harsh and stern you get you are only doing it because of love and so you cannot be called hard and cruel at least as far as your intentions go. Jesus said that a man who looks at a woman with lust commits adultery in his heart and he said that if your eye causes you to sin it is better if you gouge it out (Matthew 5). He said this to indicate the abhorrence that he considers to be due to even a harmless sin of lust. The handbook says that Christ miraculously separates the sin from the sinner so that you can love the sinner and hate the sin. This is totally insane. You don't hate sin like you hate burnt custard you hate it with a bad person to person feeling. Even Christ can't change that!
Marriage vows cannot be meant if you really believe you must hate the sin. The hatred in one who pretends he doesn't hate is far worse than the hatred in one who admits it. No marriage among religious believers can be a real marriage.
Those who hate the sin are lying if they say they don't hate the sinner. They are like those who say they love you but hate the fact that you have ever been born.
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, Friedrich Nietzsche, Penguin,
CATECHISM OF THE
ECUMENICAL JIHAD, Peter Kreeft, Ignatius Press,
GOD IS NOT GREAT, THE CASE AGAINST RELIGION, Christopher Hitchens,
Atlantic Books,
HANDBOOK OF CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli,
Monarch,
HOW DOES GOD LOVE ME? Radio Bible
Class,
IN DEFENCE OF THE FAITH, Dave Hunt, Harvest House,
MADAME GUYON, MARTYR OF THE HOLY SPIRIT, Phyllis Thompson, Hodder &
Stoughton,
MORAL PHILOSOPHY, Joseph Rickaby SJ, Stonyhurst Philosophy Series,
Longmans Green and Co,
PRACTICAL ETHICS, Peter Singer,
PSYCHOLOGY, George A Miller, Penguin,
REASON AND BELIEF, Brand Blanschard, George Allen and Unwin Ltd,
1974
REASONS FOR HOPE, Ed Jeffrey A Mirus,
THE ATONEMENT: MYSTERY OF RECONCILIATION, Kevin McNamara, Archbishop of
SINNERS IN THE HANDS OF AN ANGRY GOD, Jonathan Edwards, Sword of the
Lord,
THE BRIEF OF ST ANTHONY OF
THE IMITATION OF CHRIST, Thomas A Kempis, Translated by Ronald Knox and
Michael Oakley, Universe, Burns & Oates, London, 1963
THE LIFE OF ALL LIVING,
THE NEW WALK, Captain Reginald Wallis, The Christian Press,
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN, CS Lewis,
THE SATANIC BIBLE, Anton Szandor LaVey,
THE STUDENT’S CATHOLIC DOCTRINE, Rev Charles Hart BA, Burns & Oates,