HATING BIG SINS SEEMS REASONABLE OR IS IT?
CATHOLIC TEACHING ON HATING SIN
Here is a quote from the Catechism of Christian Doctrine.
334. What are we bound to do by the rule of life taught by Jesus Christ?
By the rule of life taught by Jesus Christ we are bound always to hate sin and
to love God.
[Hate means literal hate. This catechism was written for children and others who
would understand hate to mean real hate. What is the point of saying hating
another is bad if you can torment yourself by hating their sin? Hate is an
irrational emotion and therefore paves the way for violence. Hating sin
and loving God are made two sides of the same coin. If hating sin is
immoral or dangerous or does not agree with human nature then clearly God as a
concept or a possibility is out. Atheism is vindicated.]
335. How must we hate sin?
We must hate sin above all other evils, so as to be resolved never to commit a
wilful sin, for the love or fear of anything whatsoever.
[This is pure religious extremism. It denies that faith should be about what is
good for people. Faith should be formulated in such a way so that if the faith
is wrong no harm is done. If we advocate the doctrine of 335, what right then to
we have to object to the following: "If my God wants me to kill my baby then I
must do it."]
ISSUES WITH HATING SIN
Even if Church morality were true, it does not ring true. The Church merely
tells the people that it is correct but makes little effort to show them that it
is. That is another way to ensure that a mockery of morality is promoted and
still come up from the sewer smelling of roses.
The Church says it puts forward Jesus Christ's humility as a role model for us.
Humility is defined as not having an excessively good opinion of yourself. But
if Jesus was God how could he be humble? The Church corrupts the people by
giving them an ineffectual role model. Then when they end up arrogant and
prideful the Church takes no responsibility for that. It turns its back on the
people it corrupted and blames them only.
The difference between blame and responsibility is not emphasised in the Church.
This causes untold destruction. Being judged by others is probably the biggest
contributor to mental illness and unhappiness in the world. The Church has given
no evidence of ever accepting the difference. Thus therapist today are forced to
be the missionaries of the fact that to declare a person responsible for what
they have done need not involve any element of judging or blaming. It's a clever
move to teach people to love the neighbour as themselves and then to get them to
believe things that will sneakily work against their observance of this rule.
The heart warming Christian message of forgiveness is no longer appealing when
one bears all that in mind! It is a purely cosmetic message.
Also, people are tricked to believe that forgiveness and emotional recovery from
suffering hurt feelings are the same. The message of forgiveness as formulated
by Jesus and taught in the gospel readings of the Church is vicious. It
threatens those who do not forgive with being cut off by God. When people
recover from the pain the Church boasts how its God healed them and taught them
the power of forgiveness.
How could a faith that says the person who commits homosexuality or adultery and
knows its sinful will go to Hell forever if he dies for he has rejected God for
all eternity have true concern for human rights? It is only defending rights for
cosmetic reasons.
People who commit these sins might say, "I judge me as guilty of these hell
deserving sins but the Church does not." They then find comfort in the Church.
Again that is priestly manipulation. Should you feel happy and comfortable with
people who would hate you if they knew enough to judge you?
The Hell doctrine betrays the presence of hatred for it is so obvious that you
cannot accuse yourself or anybody else of being evil to the degree that they are
capable of going to Hell forever and staying there freely without absolute
proof. We cannot prove Hell the same way we can prove the existence of sliced
bread. We would need to in order to justify saying we don't hate.
The Catholic Church says God loves us perfectly and absolutely so going to Hell
can only be down to human choice and nothing to do with him. It points out that
those who Jesus sends into eternal punishment have no genuine love for anybody
at all (Matthew 25). When we turn to the chapter, we see that Jesus told them he
was hungry and they gave him no food, he was thirsty and they gave him no drink,
was naked and they would not clothe him, they would not visit him in prison or
when they were sick. They responded that they never did that to him. He told
them that they did because they did it to the lowest of his brothers and sisters
and any who hurt them hurt him. The problem Jesus had with them was simply that
they did not show love for HIM in what they did and did not do.
They say then that if people got hardened in sin and went to hell and got out by
changing their attitude and went to heaven and there was crossing over between
heaven and hell for all eternity that would not do (page 45, Apologia Catholic
Answers to Today's Questions, Fr Marcus Holden, Fr Andrew Pinsent, CTS, London,
2010).
NOT ALL BELIEVERS SAY LOVE THE SINNER AND HATE THE SIN IS POSSIBLE
More honest Christians reject the hypocrisy of those who say they love sinners
and hate sins. 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).
The Bible teaches that we are psychological egoists and naturally selfish until
the Lord gives us a new birth that frees us from all that. Emil Brunner wrote,
One is compelled to say that, there is no one wholly good - there is a flaw in
each person of which one must say, there he fails. But most people are
in-between, a little more inclined to good, or a little more inclined to evil,
according to their natures. This view of the matter is quite correct, it is
indeed necessary. But the Bible speaks differently. “There is none that doeth
good, no, not one.” “For all have sinned”. In that passage Paul does not imply
that even the best have somewhere some little evil flaw. On the other hand,
“all” means that fundamentally all are in the same condition, namely bad. For “a
sinner” does not signify that there is something bad in him, as a splendid apple
may have a little bad speck that cane be removed with a twist of the paring
knife, so that you can scarcely see that anything has been cut out. No, by a
sinner the Bible means “bad at heart”, infected with evil at the core. “All are
sinners” does not mean that even the best are not quite saints. It means rather
that the difference between so-called good and so-called bad no longer comes
into consideration.” How is this view to be reconciled with what we first
characterised as correct? That is not hard to say. We have spoken of what holds
true among men, and there it is true so far as human affairs go. But before God
the matter is otherwise. Sin is a depravity that has laid hold on us all. It is
a radical perversion from God, disloyalty to the Creator who has given us so
much and remains so loyal, an insulting alienation from Him, in which all of us,
without exception, have shared.
(page 41,42, Our Faith, SCM Limited, London, 1956).
Jesus approvingly cited Leviticus 20:9 where God says, “If there is anyone who
curses his father or his mother, he shall surely be put to death; he has cursed
his father or his mother, his bloodguiltiness is upon him”. In other words, he
knew what he was doing and brought it on himself. To call a person a sinner is
to say they bring the bad consequences and the unhappiness on themselves. Only
deranged people or hypocrites would pretend they want to see sins suffer but see
the sinners get away with them. If sinners bring their own problems on
themselves then loving the sinner and hate the sin cannot do them any good.
Going into denial that the sinner and the sin are one and the same will not help
at all.
SICKNESS
If you hate the sin, even if you mean hate not in the emotional sense but in the
sense that you emotionlessly agree that the sin shouldn’t exist, you are hating
the sinner as well because the sinner is the sin. The sinner is the sin for sin
is not an act but what a person becomes. To wish the sin didn’t exist is the
same as wishing the person would lose everything and disintegrate into nothing.
So are we to not care then if a person does wrong or not? No. There is an answer
but the Church cannot accept it. The answer is to see evil as a sickness not as
something that makes a person evil in any sense or partly. The person is good
but just something evil is coming out through them that needs to be fixed and
judging the person must be excluded.
RELATIONSHIPS
If a sin does not affect relationships with God or others then sin does not
matter. Saying it does is hypocritical hot air. To accuse somebody of being a
sinner is to deny a relationship to them in so far as they are regarded as
anti-God and anti-law and anti-others.
To sin then is to reject a real or deep relationship with God and law and
others. Thus to try and have one with unrepentant sinners is trying to impose on
them and manipulate them so that you get a nice warm glow from exercising your
hypocritical fake love.
Christianity offers cheap hypocritical love. Cheap love is always hypocritical
love. It naturally turns to hate faster than real love can and does. It is easy
for the sinner to repent when the Church does not even ask for evidence or proof
that this repentance is real. Real repentance tries to prove itself.
HATE IS AN ATTACK ON THE OBJECT OF HATRED'S EXISTENCE
If we really sin, then my sin and me is the same thing. Therefore for anybody to
love me is to love my sin. If they say they hate my sin they are not loving me
for they can’t do both at the one time. They are forgetting I am a person then
and focusing on my sin as if it were a thing. Outright hatred would be better
than the indifference this makes a virtue of! If they hate my sin they must hate
me. My sin cannot go out of existence unless I do. Repenting does not change the
fact that the sin still happened.
To hate somebody’s sin is to wish that person never existed to commit the sin
for the person caused it. You want them to die or pop out of existence or to
have never been born and to have had a person who was never born but who would
have done better born in their place. It is no use to object that you wish the
person did exist when you think of the good side for even the person who hates
your guts must like some things about you. Indeed they need to like something
about you so as to be able to hate you. Hate is based on wanting to punish a
person for not suiting what you want. You like that they can please you. Your
problem is that they do not.
You would wish that if you had a choice between nice person X and sinful person
Y dying you would choose Y even if the death was a really terrible one. We see
then we might as well hate the sinner when we wish he never existed so he gains
nothing from our “love” and neither do we. All the love is, is just an empty
boast. The whole reason we oppose hate is because hate wishes harm and will
often lead to harm being done. If the love Christians have is as bad – and it
is, but thankfully most of the Christians are not really Christians – then it is
only hypocrisy for them to condemn hate and their love is hate. Remember this is
hypothetical here – I am not inciting hatred against Christians.
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.
You do not judge the insane person who is attacking you and trying to kill you
as sinful. That person will suffer from your efforts to defend yourself and you
may even kill him. Imagine how much keener you will be if the person is sane!
Love the sinner and hate the sin is really about benefiting you and not the
sinner for it does not make the sinner any safer.
You are considered at least unwittingly harmful if you deny that only hurt
people hurt. You give people the best chance to reform if you see the hurt in
them and recognise it. When people do not see your hurt, further anger will
ensue. In the light of the knowledge that only hurt people hurt, love the sinner
and hate the sin is useless and a distraction. Looking at a hurt person as a
sinner is callous and unhelpful. It is really about concern for good as an
abstract concept and not for helping the person.
LONG-TERM SIN AND BIG SIN
Long term activity that is allegedly sin will be seen as part of you and who you
are. A single act can do that too. A doctor is seen as a murderer not as a
life-saver even if he saves billions and murders one. Those who say they do not
make sins and sinners identical ever are liars. They think they are the same and
they feel they are the same. It is easier to feel that a person is just their
sin than to think it. Thus you can be put in a box over one sin that was not
that bad.
This shows that those who treat sins and temporary slips and not reflective
of the person are lying. Love the sinner and hate the sin is really about you
not the sinner for you are making a pretence.
HELL
Christian teaching says that if you die estranged from God you will be damned in
the evil of Hell forever. Some explain, "The damned must really become that evil
when they identify themselves with their sin. They close themselves off from God
forever and irrevocably. There is nothing left that God can work on to change
them so all good is gone from them. That is why they must stay in Hell forever."
They are basically saying that anybody who denies the honesty of loving the
sinner and hating the sin should suffer in Hell. In reality, this is the only
thing that really puts them in Hell and keeps them there. The believers ignore
the fact that if the deterioration is gradual then it cannot happen all at death
as in instantaneous. They are really trying to blame the sinner for God making
them permanently and irrevocably bad.
If the believers are right to say that you damn yourself by gradually
self-corrupting, then those who would be damned if they died now and those who
are damned must be seen as having no genuine good in them. To hate their sin
would be to hate them for they identify themselves with their sin. If Christians
believe the reason for eternal damnation is that a totally evil choice is made
then they cannot look for anything to praise in mortal sinners, that is, sinners
who deserve Hell. The sinners then must be hated. When somebody is totally evil
and is sin that person would have to be hated to avoid loving the sin. The
doctrine of Hell certainly urges Christians to hate sinners.
If you thought that some girl was leading your precious little Johnny into sin
that deserves everlasting suffering in Hell such as sex outside marriage, hating
her would be inevitable. You would hate her far more than you would hate her if
she murdered him for better dead and out of existence than rotting in Hell in
everlasting agony.
To use God as a means of making people live moral lives fails for his hatred of
sin means he hates the sinner. 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. The teaching of Hell shows how
much God hates sin. It shows that Christians have to do the same for they
believe you have to become like God.
FINALLY
Love sinner and hate sin sums up God. To love God is to hate sin.
To hate sin is to love God. But the love is a lie. Some believers
admit the truth. Other's won't.
