"Love the person but
hate the harm they do to themselves"
Hating Sin is not Hating the Harm
Love the sinner and hate the sin is the corner stone of Christianity and other
religions. Catholics are to love the sinner and hate the sin. Their God does
that too. At least he says he does!
Some who think loving sinners and hating sins is possible are confusing it with
love the person and hate the harm they do to themselves. They need to see that
harm and pain is not the sin.
Loving the person means hating the harm they do to themselves. This is not a
religious precept. It is a human one. Even the biggest sceptic about right and
wrong can hate to see a person suffer.
What is sin?
Morality implies that you must do something or suffer punishment for failing to
do it. With morality, if you break the rules you deserve punishment. Morality
then demands that evil be visited on the wrongdoer. For an atheist, an evil
action may be immoral. But for a believer it is immoral in God's sight and by
God's law. That is what sin means. A sin means a sign of an immoral character in
the sight of God. It calls for and deserves and earns punishment and
condemnation.
Sin and Harm are separate
God says that doing some forms of harm to others is a sin. But it does not
follow that doing deliberate and unnecessary harm and sinning are identical.
Jesus said you must love the Lord, God as a person, with all your heart and mind
and strength. Loving God as Lord means you do his will and not your own. It
follows then that the harm done by sin is not what makes it sin. The harm is a
side-effect of disobeying God.
The person who thinks loving the sinner and hating the sin makes sense is making
a mistake. They mistake hating what a person is doing to themselves for hating
the sin. It is not the same. You can hate a person hurting themselves without
thinking of it as a sin or something morally bad.
You can hate the harm a person does to themselves. You do this without making
any moral assessment of them or their behaviour. If a moral judgment is present,
it is excluded. You refuse to be motivated by it. For you, it is about helping
the person.
You hate your child making the mistake of burning himself.
That is lovingly hating the harm he has done. You hate it because you love him.
But if you see the child as sinning you are judging the child as at least partly
evil as a person. To do that is intrinsically the same as believing, "Punishment
needs to be visited on this child." There is no concern for the child's
wellbeing in so far as he is judged.
Thus you cannot punish the sin by your hate and condemnation without hating the
sinner.
A sinner is a person perceived by God as a morally bad person who deserves to
suffer for what they have done and hopefully will suffer for it. You cannot hate
a sin. What you hate is what a sin says about the sinner. It’s the sinful
character that is hated. In other words, it’s the person.
Choice or force?
Let us choose prostitution as an example of something that people consider
immoral. Any example would do to make the point.
What if a woman is a prostitute by choice? What if another one is by force? The
prostitute who freely does it is seen as the most harmful one even if she
practices safer sex to protect her clients unlike the forced one. If she were
compelled and doing the same things she would to be seen as harmful. This
clearly suggests that merely being a prostitute is bad and it is not about any
harm done to anyone or herself. That is not a morality. It is just hate lurking
in the guise of love. When the harm does not matter, it is clear that believers
are saying that being a prostitute makes you a thing and you are really not a
real person anymore. That is moralism and a morality that does not worry about
harm in itself is not a morality at all. They go as far as to say that the harm
done by prostitution is down to prostitution being wrong and that the harm is
simply the consequences. Thus harm is separated from the act.
Witchcraft with its law of An it harm none do what ye will is far superior to
Christianity and similar cons.
Opposing
To oppose somebody’s self-destructive ways is seen as good. But to oppose is to
oppose the person. Opposing is violent in the sense that you want to hurt the
person by stopping them doing what they want. It’s evil even if it is for their
own good in the future. It is like hitting a child so that he learns how to
forgive. Opposing is not good - its evil though the results of doing it may be
good. Good is not snow white but one of countless shades of grey.
Love person hate the harm they do to themselves contradicts love sinner and hate
sin
Love sinner and hate sin is confused with a philosophy of hating the harm a
person does to themselves and loving the person. But that philosophy actually
contradicts it! To hate sin is about wishing it was possible for the person to
be paid back. Love the person but hate the harm they do to themselves is about
wishing the harm could be taken away.
Imagine the two rules could agree.
Then which rule is the most important?
God by definition must be put first in all things for he is perfectly good. If
God is unimportant to you then it will be, "Love the person but hate the harm
they do to themselves."
If God matters to you the important rule will be, "Love the sinner or breaker of
God's law. But hate his law-breaking for it offends God." That is what love the
sinner and hate the sin means.
If you love people, then cease to regard God as important.
Love the sinner and hate the sin is no true friend to those who wish to stop
people being harmed. It's a hindrance with its lies and the confusion it
creates.
Love sinner and hate sin is tactical for it is about
stopping sinful actions and one way to do that is to make the sinner feel loved
so that she or he will desist and repent. Those who love their sin will
not want that Christian love! It gets them to put walls up. It is really about
people feeling smug that they oppose sin while they in fact empower others to
get better at it and more intransigent.
We conclude that instead of asking if the behaviour of some is immoral or moral
we should ask how we make/help them see that they don't really want to engage in
it. It is actually immoral to do this for morality is about law and a law by
definition is to be enforced. Who cares?
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