Why Hate a Sin?

Sin is the religious understanding of immorality - if you lack love and justice you lack God so sin attacks God as well as yourself and others. Sin is an offence against the infinitely good God. It is detrimental to one's relationship with God. It has to be hated for it is the opposite of God. To love God implies you do not love his opposite. To love it is to refuse to love him. As sin is considered to be evil, the Church cannot allow a person to like it or to respect it to any degree. God is called holy – a word that means that he cannot stand or tolerate sin.

You have to hate sin for God hates it so you internalise his hate for it and plus you hate it in your own right.  There are two hates.

Many people however hate what we might call sin on humanistic grounds.
 
Sin is the person damaging their own power to be virtuous by God's help.
 
Sin can lead to the person being attracted to and committing more sin.
 
Sin can be a person hurting others.
 
Hating can be based on the fact that we have to hate something so sin is the best thing to hate. The implication is that if religion does not guide us in hating sin we will end up hating God or ourselves or others. We are told we are inherently hating entities. That is a dangerous message to get out. If you hate sin for you have to hate something then you are not hating sin but using it as an outlet for your hate. We can be sure everybody feels they must hate something so they look for a way to channel it.
 
Hating sin as sin - that is an insult to God - should really be the ultimate consideration for Christians. If God alone matters then it should be the only concern not just the ultimate concern.
 
So sin is saying if God's nature is good and love you reject that nature and it is an implicit attack.
 
Evil is defined as a would-be attack on God's nature which is extremely or maximally evil for it is trying to turn the only true good being away from his goodness. It is an attack on your own nature as well assuming God made you to be good and loving like him. It involves despising God even if you are not aware of despising. Not being aware makes you more evil not less.
 
The classical Greek idea about sin is that it is like firing an arrow at the right target and missing which on the bright side indicates that you must repent your moral failure and aim again and try to get it right. Repenting suggests you are trying to heal your flaw perhaps with the forgiving help of God.
 
Sin is a lie for it tries to distort what good and love is.
 
It leads to more lies and eventually the sinner may feel that God agrees with his or her sins.
 
People claim to fight evil with good example and love. They think that they are so good that they rescue others from moral ruin simply by being in contact with them so that they can be absorbed by their wonderful example. This is not fighting at all. It is clearly magical thinking. It is being confident that you are so great that the good you do will encourage people not to fight evil but simply to walk away from it. This paradoxically is evil as in arrogance and imprudence and is presumptuous. Evil is that which asks for a fight and any form of evil is by default in conflict with other forms of evil. Evil is fought with evil and pretending different is being a hypocrite and a liar and the fuel of the problem. Evil is fought with harm that you think is justified that you call regrettable but necessary evil but you need to want to hurt the enemy otherwise you will be ineffective.
 
One reason evil is hated is how it needs attacking with another evil and that is dangerous. Effectively, this means you are going to respond to a person who is evil in a particular way by being evil in a different way and telling yourself this is good and justified. Don't pretend you are doing something about the evil in others just by showing them your good traits and works. Don't try to feel good about pretending you are doing something.
 
Sin is a break of God's law that we must not hurt others and simultaneously a break of God's law that we live in accord with how God would live if he were us.
 
Sin wants to hurt and destroy.
 
It wants to be your cancer.
 
Sin is an abuse of your power to help and to love God.
 
Jesus said that sin enslaves you and kills you and is clever. He may have got this from Genesis 4:7 where God says, "If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it." Thus sin though not considered an intelligence or a person is treated as if it were. In practical terms, it is somehow the same as some kind of person to be hated. If you love the sinner genuinely the "person" you hate is sin. That is still as good as hating a person and why are you letting the bad person away with it so you can give the hate to a made up "person"? This looks like a trick to avoid making it obvious that it is the sinner you hate.
 
Sin invites disgust, shame, disapproval, judgment and punishment. It is evil to want those things. If you don't then don't sin. Don't make those terrible things be done to you. Jesus said that sin has the power to make you reject God and cause you to weep and gnash your teeth for all eternity. The Bible says that you go to the lake of fire.
 
So each sin is really a summary of different evils each of which is bad on its own without regard to the others.
 
Evil by definition is that which has to be fought by necessary evil. Evil is that which cannot be tolerated. It says to you, "I am a situation that should not be let to happen." So evil goes with a call to be hated. So with the evil vanquished good will flood into the vacuum.
 
What about those who say we must love the sinner and hate the sin? If they keep the rule then they have to clutch at straws in order to work out why the sin is to be condemned as something that ought not to exist. For example, they say it effects other people spiritually for we are one spiritual family so one member in a sense damages all the rest by sinning in some indirect mystical way.
 
Another example is that they say the person not only does mental and personality damage to herself – but spiritual damage to herself. Just as psychologically it is easier to do evil y if you have done evil x so it will happen spiritually too.
 
Another example is that they claim the sin draws the sinner and others by bad example to everlasting damnation and punishment. Another example is that it makes you become a tool of Satan who wants nothing but spiritual, emotional and bodily destruction for everybody. The love the sinner and hate the sin brigade are trying to convince themselves that their hate for the sinner is really love. That is what is going on. They have to talk themselves into the hate so when they are trying to hate that says a lot about them. And they succeed. If hating immorality is a good thing then they are getting new reasons to hate it and that is not good. If a secularist hates an evil just because it is immoral the religionist has this and additional reasons or excuses to hate. Doing that is proof that the sinner is the target of hate after all.
 
God is infinite meaning everything about him is, not a number too great for us to imagine, but literally numberless. Infinite is that which is great without end or limit. Christians use this doctrine to argue that as God is good it means he is unlimitedly good thus evil is his complete opposite. The distance between God and evil is infinite. This calls us to be like God and to oppose and hate evil as much as we can.
 
This tells us that we cannot ever understand how far from God and good evil is. Any view of evil we have will be watered down. It may not feel that way but it is. We cannot care the way God cares. Our caring for another no matter how deep is idolatrous for it is a mere imitation of how God cares. Thus if we hate sins it will never be the same as how God hates it. Our hate for sin masks hate for the sinner. Even if loving sinners and hating sins is achievable for God, we should be sceptical of humans who claim to do it. And especially so if it is achievable for God!

 
If you love God with all your heart as Jesus commanded, you will hate sin with all your heart. Sin is what cries out for God's destruction or the destruction of God's perfection. It is contradicting God.

 
Sin is to be hated for it is useless in itself. It is evil.

 
Sin is to be hated for its bad results.

 
Sin is to be hated for it says something about the sinner. If you kill a man for no reason, you turn yourself into a murderer. You cannot say, "Being a murderer is only a small part of me." It is what you are period.

 
We all agree that we should hate the crime of murder. Religion tells us to hate more evils than just murder.

 
Jesus said we must hate sins such as sexual fantasy about a married woman. He said that if you call somebody a fool you should be taken before the council who gives the death penalty. Paul wrote that the reason we die is because Adam got us sentenced to death by divine justice for his sin and ours. This is extreme doctrine. Whoever hates your sin too much hates you and won't admit it. Roman Catholicism is full of mortal sins - sins that are supposedly worse than being murdered for they bring you spiritual death and if you die you will never ever see Heaven but will be punished forever in Hell.

 
If God exists and he is perfect good, then evil is to be hated for the alternative is to love it or not care.
 
Good and evil are intermingled. When you help one beggar another suffers a lack.
 
Suppose a doctor puts his fingers inside the private parts of a child. If it is not for a necessary medical purpose, it will be recognised as child-abuse. It is the intention then that makes the difference between medical and molest. But what about the physical action?
 
The action would be very bad for it is the intention that is good not the action. 

When you do harm to help a person, you have to numb a part of your nature to do it. Even if you hurt to do good, you are still intending to hurt. You are coming close to being a person who hurts for fun.
 
The "good" person will be horrified at what they had to do to help the child and the "good" child will be horrified that it needed to be done.
 
Trying to be good in the way religion wants it done, is a recipe for disaster. It is better to be ordinary and imperfect and not to be obsessed with good. Doing that harms.
 
The atheist will have a healthy respect for good. The believer cannot for good is not just good for its own sake but for God's. 

 
If a person is evil, we will dislike that person and want to see him suffer just for our pleasure. That is hate. Evil means hateful.

 
The Church says that hate is wrong because it damages the hater. But surely if you hate then you deserve the damage! So the Church argument does nothing to prove that it is wrong! Rather it proves the opposite! It's another case where the Church likes to pretend to be helpful.

 
Also, to say that hate is wrong because it hurts the hater makes no sense. It follows then that all is wrong is the pain not the hate. It implies hate would be good if it wasn’t so darn unpleasant!

 
Evil religious hate mongers will take comfort from the thought that the only problem is the pain. They can reason that they like the pain so it is nothing to worry about and their conscience is clear.

If you feel warm towards others it allows you to help them and them to experience happiness through knowing you. Is hate a sin for it refuses this opportunity to the hated person? It is really saying that it is better for that person to be bad rather than for him to be hurt.

 
Criticism is always vindictive. What about constructive criticism ? To criticise the sin is to criticise the sinner so to hate the sin is to hate the sinner.

A sinner commits sin. The Church says we are to love her. To hate her sin is to pretend her sin is separate from her and that she didn’t do it. What kind of nonsensical love is that? It's hypocrisy and if she has hurt another person then it is downright evil to insult that person by trying to condone what she has done. Its worst form is the obviously deluded, “Judge the sin not the sinner.” If you treat the sin as something to be hated and as something impersonal surely then you would deal with it without regard for the person? You wouldn't call the person a sinner but a non-sinner.
 
The Church judges acts of revenge. When you take revenge it will not say, “You meant well. You intended to do justice. You just did it the wrong way.” It judges. This implies that it agrees with judging any sin. You don't pick out some sin for judgement and not others.

It cannot be proven that we should define wrongdoing as sin and hate it as sin. That is only a chink to let the flood of hatefulness into you. The over the top teaching against sin is clearly hate no matter how sweetly it is delivered.