What If My Sin is not Part of Me?

Religion says God is all good but struggles to get God and evil to fit.  So what it does is argue that evil is not real but is a good that is not good enough.  That way it can say God did not make evil for there is nothing to make.  That in fact denies the truth that inherent evil exists.  You end up having a hard time denying that some evil person meant well.  One rule of goodness is that you assume the best!  You would have to object, "Stop assuming that bad people are doing what is self-evidently good to them. You cannot know that it really is self-evident to them."  The knots you end up tied up in if you try to make God sound smart!  There is something amiss by default when people have to be downgraded and maligned for a doctrine. 

Suppose evil is watered down as something that is not a thing in any sense at all.  Then no person or part of what it is to be a person can be inherently evil. It makes no sense to say evil is inherently evil. It can only be that if it is a power or a person or part of a person.  Love is inherently good. So is it better to love a rock than not to love at all?

If you want to be good at abusing and hurting another person, tell them you do it because you love them.  You tell them that your evil is not part of you and that there is no part of you, not even a bit that is inherently evil. Stop assuming that bad people are doing what is self-evidently good to them. You cannot know that it really is self-evident to them.
 
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. The absurdity shows you are guilty of hating and trying to hide it.
 
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.
 
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.
 
Marriage vows cannot be meant if you really believe you must hate the sin and love the sinner.  That doctrine would be the foundation of your whole life and your endorsement of love for your spouse would be part of it. Marriage is in essence a vow to love your spouse and hate their sins. No marriage among religious believers can be a real marriage for the vow is nonsense.
 
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.
 
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 doing wrong. Sins don't sin but people do. To be angry with the sin 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? If you are honest, you will see that you DO hate the sinner but won't admit it.
 
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. This encourages great anger and hostility towards sin for if you love God you will hate the sin that disrespects him.
 
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.
 
Alcoholics and many people with emotional problems will not be helped unless they are told they are the cause of their own problems and that they can change. They need to overcome religious conditioning that seeks to have them think their sins are almost alien to them. How can people be opposed to fair judging when those people need to start seeing their wrongs as part of who they are? Perhaps people are antagonistic to judging just because they themselves don’t want to be judged and they have a lot to hide and be insecure about.
 
To say that a person may do wrong through stupidity and through weakness so it could be inappropriate to call them a sinner is a strange thing for the occasions of wrong can be avoided. And people know they have a responsibility to learn about themselves and what is right. They might not be to blame for what they have done now for they cannot change the past. In that sense the freedom was lost. But it does not help to pretend they have no responsibility.
 
A person being gripped by weakness now and doing wrong because of it, does not entitle you to pretend you do not judge them. To judge a person and pretend you don’t is to shove the hate for the person into the subconscious and to pervert your feelings. Unacknowledged negativity is the cause of all neurosis and attraction to evil.
 
When you tell a gossip he must not judge another person whose reputation he is attacking for he could not know all the facts you will feel proud that you have done something for the do not judge adage. But you are judging him. You cannot be a hypocrite and expect people to trust you when you claim that you love the sinner and hate the sin.

Christians say that to love the sinner is to hate the sin and vice versa. Hate the sin and love the sinner means we must judge the sinner fairly and condemn sin when we see it. To not condemn the sin and to judge it is to hate the sinner. Surely then the more sin we see in a person the better. Why? If hating the sin is another way of loving the sinner as the Church says, then the more you see a person as a sinner the more you love them. Even if you mistakenly think they are worse than they are, that is brilliant. That the Church does not draw this conclusion is proof that it knows fine well that to hate the sin is to want to maliciously hurt the sinner.

To love the sinner and to hate the sin is to actually tell sinners not to be offended by condemnation of their sin. It is telling them that the condemnation isn’t personal. If somebody gets very angry and riles against your sin, you will be hurt. To say they are angry at the sin and not you isn’t going to help you or them. It will make you feel worse. What is the point of condemning sin when the condemnation is not personal – not against the sinners? If it's not personal they should not be upset by it or offended and so its intended to be no good. For them to be offended would be a sin! That the condemning still happens and is still done and recommended suggests that the condemners are getting personal after all and lying about it. Condemning sin is personal because it feels personal. You don’t condemn a knife because somebody accidentally cuts themselves with it. And if sin can be divorced from the person it is in the position of the knife.
 
If you are not condemning persons when you condemn sin then why should you care if what you say about their sin is right or not? Why not impute bad motives to them until your heart is content? If you judge somebody’s action as bad – especially when it is an action that could be regarded as justified under the circumstances if you knew of them all such as a wife not speaking to her husband – without knowing the whole picture it is obvious that you are being personal and seeking to attack a person or to destroy their good standing and make them look bad. You wouldn’t be judging if you didn’t want to climb into a position of moral superiority and have a go at the person.
 
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 it 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.
 
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 as you 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.”

Punishment that is not an expression of personal feeling against evil or the evil person is not punishment at all. It is like trying to think of the flu without admitting that there is a personal and human element. Punishing is a way of disapproving seriously of evil and taking the evil as seriously as it should be taken.   Punishment that is not punishment is intended to be an injustice.

The rule that sin is inherently evil but no part of the sinner is thus we should love sinners and hate their sins is only an encouragement for religious deceit and counterfeit virtue.