Sin and Sinner are one
and the Same
You cannot separate sin and sinner so to hate the sin is to hate the sinner
"The disengagement of moral self-sanctions from inhumane conduct is a growing human problem at both individual and collective levels" Albert Bandura, Stanford University, https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Bandura/Bandura1999PSPR.pdf
Love the sinner and hate the sin is at the very heart of many religions.
This core teaching has been exposed over and over as a hypocritical lie.
If you want to be good at abusing and hurting another person, tell them you do
it because you love them.
If they believe you, it is then and only then that you have power over them
Your innate qualities show in your behaviour. You can't be a sinner because you
sin but you must sin because you are at least partly a sinner. Whoever says that
they condemn your behaviour, and not your innate qualities is being a pure
hypocrite.
Sin is not about the harm you do outwardly but about the intention that did the
harm. The intention is you and speaks about you.
If people really want you to understand the sinner, why don't they say that we
should not judge paedophiles or sadistic murderers unless we are paedophiles and
sadistic murderers?
If you sin, you deserve to suffer and be hurt for your sin. Deserve means you
get what is your fair due. Loving the sinner is not going to help them - it only
helps you be smug. There is no point in preaching about sin (sin means
wrongdoing and how it offends God - the atheist will condemn wrongdoing but not
as sin) if your message is, "Your sins do not affect how I think of you." You
will not be taken seriously and the sinner will feel encouraged to persist in
sin. Many of us identify ourselves with our sins. Thus we will feel hated.
Hate sin and love sinner does little good.
If we love our sins, we will feel hated.
The Doctrine
Sin is rebellion against the will of God. The Christians have managed to get
seen as fairly innocuous through their two-faced doctrine of detesting the
rebellion and loving the rebellious person. This teaching is a cloak over
Christian incitement to hatred. When Christians engage in violence over
religion, their leaders seek to avoid responsibility for this by claiming to
love sinners and hate sins.
Religion says you must love the sinner and hate the sin. Sinner means your sin
is not the problem but what you say about yourself by sinning. So why is it not
phrased as, "Love the sinner and hate the sinner"? Because that would render the
hypocrisy too obvious.
Another version is, "I love you. I do not condemn your sin to judge or to hurt
you but merely state that it is bad. I state it not as a criticism but as a
fact." This is trying to separate the hatefulness of sin from the fact of sin.
The two go together. To see sin as a fact is a refusal to see sin as evil. It is
trying to make it an abstract thing and not a real evil. It is trying to water
the condemnation down.
Would you consider a person sincere if they said to you, "I am sorry I have to
hate your sin"? They tell you that the sin has nothing to do with you but if it
doesn't then why are they saying sorry to YOU? The person is pretending that you
can separate the sin from the person. The person cannot be sincerely sorry for
hating!
What's Sin?
Sin is using your free will to create separation from God. It is a religious
term. It means doing what God has forbidden. Sin and evil are not the same thing
though sin is supposed to be evil for many actions that are not evil or
necessarily that harmful are excoriated as sins. Unbelievers talk about evil and
believers talk about sin. Unbelievers consider the pain caused by evil while
believers worry more that it is forbidden by God's legal decree.
Sin is not a thing as such. It is a description of what a person has become - a
criminal. Sin is the 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.
A sinner is a person who makes sin partly or wholly part of themselves. They
make themselves bad at least up to a point and invite bad consequences. If this
definition is wrong then there is no such thing as a sinner. To call somebody a
sinner is to say they brought the bad consequences on themselves. This
eliminates compassion. How could you love them when love and compassion are
inseparable? To call somebody a sinner is to agree with the bad they bring on
themselves - it means agreeing under the circumstances.
The Doctrine of Loving the Sinner and Thinking of Sin as not Part of
them
The Church says that we must love sinners and hate sins. This is on a par with
Father Anthony de Mello’s insane advice that when you are suffering never think,
“I am suffering”, but, “It (hand, stomach, knee etc) is what is suffering not
you!" The Church even makes a command of its insane law which makes it a form of
bullying. If the command is true and good we don't need to be commanded to do
it. Love is something that is freely given. You don't command love.
Anyway the Church command means you judge the sin not the sinner.
You view the sin as bad or dangerous not the sinner.
You see the sin as deserving punishment not the sinner.
Clearly we are to think of the sinner as perfect and the sin as something that
has nothing to do with them at all.
But if that is true then why are they calling the person a sinner?
When you break the command down to find out its meaning you feel and see plainly
how stupid and hypocritical it is.
Sin is you and you are sin
This page is about what everybody knows but few dare to admit: that to hate sin
is to hate the person who creates the sin.
Sin cannot be treated separately from the sinner for it reveals the sinner, it
reveals what kind of person the sinner is. The sinner makes himself or herself
harmful in some way and invites and accepts evil into his or her core or being.
To fail to see that is an act of hate itself for it refuses to see properly what
the sinner does to his or her victims and understand it for the evil that it is.
Love the sinner and hate the sin is vindictive in this sense.
When you become a sinner, being a sinner becomes the core of your sense of self.
When somebody says they are gay they will argue that gay is them, their gayness
is one of the things that define them as a person. They did not make themselves
gay. How much more does something you make yourself to be define you?
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".
Love the sinner and hate the sin will lead to a distorted view of the wrong
people do. It is not the way to influence or stop people doing harm. It is no
wonder some Christians virtually condone the evil that monsters do to them. They
may make excuses etc. Christian communities are famous for enabling criminals by
turning a blind eye.
You can't Hate the Sin if it is Separate from the Person
The sin cannot be hated until it is seen to exist and it is only seen to exist
if the person is judged. In other words, there cannot be a sin without a person
being freely responsible for it. The sin cannot be divorced from the person.
Even if the person may be different from the sin, there is no distinction. It is
like the difference without a distinction that exists between sight and the eye.
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? It's only a thing and has no will of its own. What would be the point of
hating the fact that it is raining in Australia now when you are living in the
UK? Hating the sin and not the sinner is only for crazy people. When say we hate
cheese or crap on our doorstep. But this only refers to dislike because they are
harmless things that don’t have to harm us. We don’t really hate them because we
want them to exist for they have to exist for human betterment but we don’t want
to. Real hatred involves wishing the thing didn’t exist and wishing it for
unreasonable and malevolent motives. If sin is a thing or to be treated as
something separate from the sinner that her or she has nothing to do with you
can’t hate it. So you can’t hate the sin so if you hate something it has to be
the sinner and you won’t admit it. This then is the morality of Christianity and
many religions, hating people but hiding it under charm and serenity.
To teach that sin is some kind of object or property with which God and
ourselves is exclusively angry is illogical. It is irrational to get angry at an
object or property. Anger makes you irrational in your approach to those whom
you are angry at. Imagine how you will make it worse by trying to hate things
not people. Do not say that anger at the sin not the sinner SEEMS unfeasible. It
is unfeasible. There is no seems about it.
Doing wrong without meaning to be evil is not sin but becoming evil is sin. To
hate sin as if the person has nothing to do with it is to hate nothing. It is
hypocritical self-torment.
God and hating the sin, loving the sinner
“Sin” is just a shorthand way of describing what sinners do and what kind of
people they are. To say that the wrath and hatred of God is reserved only for
people’s actions doesn’t make sense because actions are not independent things
from the people who perform them. If I go out and steal a disabled person's car,
God isn’t angry at the physical process of a given human being removing a
particular piece of hardware. He is angry at me. Sin is a shorthand way of
talking about sinners in the context of their actions. To make out that it is
the physical process God has the problem with is deeply vicious towards the
victim.
To say that God or anyone hates sin is really just a quick way of saying that
God or anyone hates people for doing evil things. In other words, to say that
God’s or anybody's wrath and hatred is reserved only for sin is actually to say
that God’s or anybody's wrath and hatred is reserved only for sinners.
Thin
Saying that you condemn the sin not the sinner is mad because you will not say:
The sin is sick but the sinner is not.
The sin is bad but the sinner is as good as any saint.
The sin does harm to the sinner but the sinner does no harm to herself or himself.
The sin does harm to the others not the sinner.
The sin needs to be punished not the sinner.
You will not say, "I will not praise x for being so kind for she can only do good and not bad. I hate her for being so perfect. Even her sins are nothing to do with her."
We have to see how deranged and selfish and two-faced
loving sinners and hating their sins is. It is too thin to impress anybody
and it may make you feel smug but it will not inspire the sinner to see such
hypocrisy and to feel so mothered as if he or she was useless and needs your
parenting.
Finally
If sin and sinner need separate treatment then they are separate. One wonders
how you can treat a sin if the sinner is separate from it! It is the sinner you
may try to reason with!
Nobody says, "Praise the good deed not the good person." (If you cannot say that
then you cannot say people must hate the sin and love the sinner either.) Or,
"The sin must repent not the sinner." Why bother repenting at all if the sin is
nothing to do with you - which raises the question of why it is called your sin
at all. One minute sin is defined as, "A person abusing their responsibility to
God and God's law" and then we are told that it does not imply that the person
is bad to any degree. The separation between sin and sinner is really just
lip-service.
You have to own your sin and say it is you. There is no sin
- it is just sinner. The lie about separating the two means repentant
and forgiveness end up being fake and hollow and no wonder the Christian
religion has been rather merciless.
If hating the sin is hating the sinner then love for sinners 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. It is a non-distinction
disguised as a distinction.
The good deeds done by religion are based on a lie and such goodness soon shows
its true colours and falls like a house of cards.
