| What is Forgiveness? | Christianity Says | Reason Says |
| It is letting go of anger and past hurts | Other people come before you so you must let go of anger for their sake. God said you must love him first of all so you love him best by serving others even at your own loss for the more of his children are looked after the better he is pleased. Love sinner: hate sin. Hating sin is more important than loving the sinner for loving God comes first. | Let go for your own sake. Forgiving will be three times harder if you are expected to do it for somebody else. Religion puts a burden on people. |
| It is not forgetting the sin or pretending it never happened. Its not a "business as usual" attitude. | God justifies us when he forgives meaning he considers us good though we are not. God forgets so we should forget too. | Asking people to forget is asking them to put themselves at risk of harm from the person that hurt them and to blind themselves to what that person is like. It is psychologically harmful as well. We need to remember the torments of life to grow from them. |
| Forgiveness is realising that there is a bigger picture with the person who has done you wrong. They are not all bad. | Some Churches agree. Others hold that sin is something you become so it defiles all the good you do meaning it is not impressive goodness. | Sin is about what the sinner is not what the sinner does. You cannot oppose the sin and not the sinner. If you hate one you hate the other. Forgiveness must be a moral obligation if it is based on seeing that the person isn't so bad. It implies you are evil if you don't forgive. |
| It is freely given | You can't get forgiven unless you forgive. It is a duty to forgive. | Blackmail. You go to Hell if you don't forgive. The
Church has pleaded for paedophile priests to be forgiven and welcomed
back to their communities even if the priests showed no remorse.
This has led to the Church doing more to get the priests forgiven than
helping the victims when it did so little or nothing to stop their
crimes. Forgiveness has to be constantly renewed so one is under the threat of blackmail all the time. |
| It is refusing to let the wrong done to you hurt you any more | Forgiveness is love | Forgiveness is not necessarily loving. You can forgive a person because you want to get back at them by coming across as better than they are and as if what they did to you can't hurt you any more. Such forgiveness is really revenge in the garb of forgiveness. But it is very healthy and good for you. It is better than the saccharine and flowery alternative the Church and Jesus Christ require of you. |
| CONCLUSION: Forgiveness only makes sense for non-believers. The God belief only makes things worse. |
||
SIN TO MAKE SINNERS (& EX SINNERS!) HAPPY
"Christian love bears evil, but it does not tolerate it. It does penance for sins of others, but it is not broadminded about sin. The cry for tolerance never induces it to quench its hatred of the evil philosophies that have entered into contest with the Truth. It forgives the sinner, and it hates the sin; it is unmerciful to the error in his mind. The sinner it will always take back into the bosom of the Mystical Body; but his lie will never be taken into the treasury of His Wisdom.
Real love involves real hatred: whoever has lost the power of moral indignation and the urge to drive the buyers and sellers from the temples has lost a living, fervent love of Truth.
Charity, then, is not a mild philosophy of "live and let live"; it is not a species of sloppy sentiment. Charity is the infusion of the Spirit of God, which makes us love the beautiful and hate the morally ugly."
True Christianity forbids tolerance for sin. It says you must really hate if you really love and forbids live and let live. Jesus violently ejected buyers and sellers from the Temple and the bishop wants us to do the same in the sense of not tolerating sin and in the sense of not saying, "Tolerate them for they mistakenly think they do right."
In The Gospel According to Atheism I wrote,
“Forgiveness is deciding that some wrong you believe a person did of
their own free will does not matter anymore.
You become their friend again and refuse to treat them with the anger
they deserve. People say forgiveness is
not weak and is not pretending that the wrongdoing was not so bad after all but
is about freeing yourself and hopefully the offender from bad feelings to live
better in the future. In practice it is
saying the wrongdoing is nothing to worry about. A bit of anger can be a good thing. It is what you do with it that counts. There is no doubt that forgiveness has the
same results as condoning which is pretending that the past evil does not
matter. In practice and in theory they
are the same so forgiveness is hypocritically rewarding evil. You can be upset at the loss of life a
murderer caused but not be upset about the abuse of his will which led to that
so forgiving does not mean you will be upset no more about the deaths. To say a past evil you did with your free
will does not matter is the same as saying that you don’t matter for you can go
beneath yourself and should. Forgiveness
is evil. The excuse for making a
distinction between forgiving and condoning is that you can forgive and still
punish for punishment is intended for the person’s own good and everybody
else’s. The punishment has nothing to do
with the evil act for it has been pardoned.
It’s done for other reasons so it is not really punishment but glorified
revenge. At the same time we are still
dealing with condoning here. It’s a
confused mixture. Sometimes people who
condone have to send the criminals they condoned to jail. You should punish because you condemn and you
have decided not to condemn therefore to punish would be revenge and
inconsistent with heartfelt forgiveness.”
Forgiveness denies the goodness and the rationality of God and backs up
atheism. It implies that since God wants
us all to forgive that this means he wants punishment banned on earth though
the Bible and Jesus both advocated stern punishments. If it is right to forgive, then it is wrong
to punish. It has to be one or the other
for mercy is pleasant and punishing is not.
There is no doubt that the old saying, “To understand all is to forgive
all” is true for all human beings have mental aberrations that make them
mistake evil for good and do wrong.
Nobody wants to do evil but they want the good they see in the evil. Fact.
To understand all means that you see that the person meant to be good
and to forgive means that you still don’t approve of what they did. But to understand all is to forgive is
correct except that the forgiveness is not real forgiveness – how can you
forgive somebody that never meant to do wrong?
But God sees evil as not understandable but abhorrent which is why
sinners, which means people who have evil in their will, rot in Hell forever
and he put the aberrations in us and when we develop them ourselves it is
because he put the aberration in us that makes us develop them in the first
place. The God concept opposes the
saying therefore the God concept is evil and is violence against humanity. God is evidently a God of hate because he
makes sure we will get things wrong and then treats us like anathema even if he
does inconsistently give us pardon at times.
There is no doubt that belief in God is an evil for it opposes the
importance of understanding all and the belief seeks to cause division and
strife and make decency rot away while pretending that everything is fine.
Christianity counsels that we love the sinner and hate the sin. This is on a par as Father Anthony de Mello’s
advice that when you are suffering never think, “I am suffering”, but, “It
(hand, stomach, knee etc) is what is suffering not you!
The Handbook of Christian Apologetics states
that it is true that we cannot avoid being Pharisees when we go on about right
and wrong and cannot hate sins without hating the sinners (page 127). Strangely, it conflicts with Christian
teaching in saying that to hate evil is to give in to evil and become evil and
negative. The reason it says this is
that hating evil can make us hard and cruel just like hating a sinner can. But they are not suggesting we should not
care about sin or love it for that would be worse than hating sin in their
opinion. So they do want us to hate sin
as the lesser evil. And they would say
that if you really hate sin, you will hate it because you love the sinner so no
matter how much you hate sin and how harsh and stern you get you are only doing
it because of love and so you cannot be called hard and cruel at least as far
as your intentions go. Jesus said that
a man who looks at a woman with lust commits adultery in his heart and he said
that if your eye causes you to sin it is better if you gouge it out (Matthew
5). He said this to indicate the abhorrence
that he considers to be due to even a harmless sin of lust.
Forgiveness is an act of pity. The
absurd thing about this is pitying somebody that deliberately does wrong. How can you pity somebody that causes their
evil out of their own free will? Would
it not be insulting them to pity their free will as if they shouldn’t have
it? Forgiveness then contradicts the
rule of condemning the sin but not the sinner.
You don’t forgive sins though you say you do. What you forgive is people because people are
sinners. If the sin is separate from the
sinner then it is nonsense to speak of sinners.
God cannot pity the sinner if the sinner sins of his or her own free
will so God can’t forgive. That is all
the attraction of God eliminated in a sentence.
And it means we can’t forgive either.
The Christian might say that pitying the sinner means you want to stop
the sinner from deliberately doing wrong because wrong is degrading and
self-abuse. If you can’t hate the sinner
then how can you pity the sinner in this sense?
To pity the sinner for the sin in the sense they mean implies that the
sinner and the sin are one which is true but if the sin is something hateful
and that should not exist that tells us that the sinner should also not exist
and be hated.
To hate sin can result in the sinner being persecuted not for themselves
but to get at sin. It is true that
hating sin is unpleasant but it is equally true that Christianity does not see
what is unpleasant as necessarily bad.
You cannot condemn hating sin as giving in to evil because you don’t
have to let it make you evil. The Church
says that God sends hateful things like suffering and can kill your beloved baby
– if you love your baby you will hate its death – to make us holier. If hating sin makes you evil then there
simply cannot be a God or he is evil if he exists. Hating evil is only hating a thing – it is
not a hate that does much harm. It only
seeks to bring harm to evil which is only right for to harm evil means doing
good. When God says he comes first it
follows that hating evil comes first therefore if hating evil is bad for you
then it is still the right thing to do even if it lands you in the local psychiatric
hospital within a fortnight.
Trying to destroy sin by preaching and by love-bombing or threatening the
vengeance of God is really saying other people have no right to their
opinion. That is what causes human evil,
people changing their mind about what is good and seeing what is harmful as the
best or good option under the circumstances.
There is no way you can love the sinner then if you hate sin for real
hatred despises the freedom and rights of others. That is one reason why Humanism does not
believe in converting people but in bringing people to the light so that they
may change themselves.
The Handbook gives the solution to the problem of how you can hate
sin and love sinner as forgiveness which it sees as a miracle that God causes us
to perform for it is so unnatural and because we CANNOT love the sinner and
hate the sin so we need to be lifted above nature to be able to.
It says forgiveness does not condone wrongdoing or condemn it. But of course forgiveness condemns for you cannot
forgive without condemning and seeing the person as deserving to suffer first
and it always condemns for it has to be maintained and kept up as it is not a
once for all thing. You can’t pardon
without condemning. All forgiving then
is self-righteous and is condemning the sinner with the sin for it is not the
sin you forgive but the sinner for it makes no sense to forgive a sin as if it
were not part of the sinner. Since
forgiveness always condemns it must condone the sin. For to condone a sin is to say you condemn it
but have no desire to see it punished but you want it encouraged by going
forward as if nothing has happened.
Christian morality is dangerous and the only solution is for the world to
turn away from it and towards Humanism which denies the hypocrisy of
forgiveness and replaces it with seeing sin as an illusion caused by an
intellectual sickness.
The claim that forgiving people causes them to separate themselves from
their sins (page 127, Handbook of Christian Apologetics) would seem to
justify forgiveness. But that is too
far-fetched of a claim. It is as silly
as saying that taking food that is probably poisoned from an enemy and eating
it is not killing yourself on the basis that your gracious acceptance will make
him relent and bring you an antidote.
Most of us like to be a mixture of good and bad and have people we will
not speak to no matter who says they are decent people.
The Christian religion says that sins committed against us ought to be
pardoned solely for the love of Jesus Christ (page 33, Moral Philosophy). When it is not for the sinner or for yourself
then how could it be really forgiveness?
It is not forgiveness to forgive somebody just to get your hands on
their money. It is not peace you are
after but the money. To condemn
somebody’s sin as hateful is to condemn them as hateful too. When you look at it this way it is even
clearer that hating sin is hating the sinner and if you say you love the sinner
you are deceiving yourself and showing your hatred for them by deceiving them
for you do not.
If God and his grace is the key to loving the sinner and hating the sin
then how come teaching the sinner that God exists is such a hateful and
injurious act? It is like trying to
douse flames with petrol. The Church
tells people that a God that inspires fear will inspire little else in them so
they present them with a nice God. But
what is the use of believing in a nice God when there are still terrible things
and possibly an eternal Hell that can happen?
It is underhand to present a nice God who lets bad things happen and
people go to Hell when you might as well believe in a bad one when the nice God
is not going to be much of a help. For
the Church to pay tribute to the nice God theory and have so many horrible
doctrines is a clear admission that the doctrines are immoral and should be
abominated. And the Christians look
forward to the battle of Armageddon in which the final showdown between good
and evil will take place with the damned going to Hell forever. They say they do not fear these things. But if they really loved others as themselves
they would fear them for them. But they
are indifferent and to the degree that they are indifferent they refuse to love
for indifference is the real opposite of love.
You have to like or love somebody to some degree to be able to be hurt
and upset enough by them to hate them.
If you hate sin then you cannot be even partly understanding towards sin
in yourself or towards the sins of others.
When God is all-good that means God comes first and he must hate sin
totally meaning that sin is the worst evil of all. It is worse than death for God made our
bodies to break down and die.
Understanding indicates that the sin is not entirely bad but is
understandable up to a point. In other
words some good intentions led to the sin and were used to make the sin
happen. But to use good to do evil does
not make anything understandable to any degree.
It makes it far worse and inexcusable.
The Roman Church emphasises that priests must be understanding in the
confessional. But this is only public
relations. But they cannot be understanding
without condoning the sin to some extent in which case it is madness going to
them to be made holy by their power of absolution. The whole point about sin is that it is
perverted good therefore to say you understand it is to deny this. This point shows why we must deny the
doctrine of free will and reject it for the poison that it is. At least then we can understand without
loving the crime for we see the crime as an illness not as something to judge
and condemn somebody for.
Forgiving a person always involves making excuses for them and blaming
yourself at least partly. That is why
you have to hear their side before you can forgive. If you were not trying to see and feel that
their sin was not a sin there would be no point in all this – you would assume
that all meant well without hearing the other person’s confession. After you forgive you may say you disapprove
of what they have done. What you mean by
this is that you call it wrong and choose to see it as wrong but in actuality
you do not. It is like a man looking at
a bad view and seeing it but not really taking it in. It is just physically seen that is all. With respect to sin that is no good. That is not hating the sin. If sin is bad you cannot love the person if
you love or are apathetic towards sin so you can’t win. It is no wonder I say there is no point or
use in believing in free will, loving or hating right without any force making
you do it, for all you end up doing is following a Janus-faced morality.
If you can love the sinner and hate the sin, you could have bad feelings
towards the person and treat them as if you hate them on the grounds that you
are treating them this way because you hate the sin in them so much because you
love them. That is like a vindictive person
claiming he does horrible things to X because he wishes X liked him and he
liked X and that that means he loves X.
If you really hate the sin and love the sinner you will be stern for
that is the only way to make it even look like you are hating the sin and
cherishing the sinner. The principle is
too easily abused to be of any good. You
never know if the stern person ever really cared. It is no better than appointing thirteen year
olds as doctors. So loving the sinner
and hating the sin is a better looking bait than it really is. It is throwing pink paint over a manure
heap. Being forgiven by God matters more
than being happy and healthy in this world for God comes first. Not only is he to be loved first but with ALL
not some of our being (Mark 12:29-34). So
forgiveness comes before the things we really value so logically being forgiven
by others must come before them too.
Therefore nobody can forbid sternness and allege that friendliness and
contentment are better and entitle us not to be stern.
Jesus said if we
do not forgive we will not be forgiven by the Heavenly Father (Matthew
6:12-15). His game then was to blackmail
us to forgive. But to pressure people to
forgive means that you are wearing down or quenching their power to
forgive. It would have been better for
Jesus to say, “Forgive for its own sake and not yours or God’s for there is no
God”. To forgive for any other reason is
just as false as forgiving somebody for shooting you just because they are
blackmailing you to do so. It’s not real
forgiveness. It only looks that way.
Suppose if
somebody robs your house and puts the money on a bet for you that is very
likely to win and it does win. If you
are given all the money you will feel you have very little to forgive and it
won’t bother you. Forgiveness then is
not about hating the sin. It is about
not getting your own way and changing your mind about being resentful about
that. To forgive somebody for doing
wrong is one thing but to forgive somebody for doing something while you have
no concern for right and wrong is not loving forgiveness. It is not loving the sinner and hating the
sin. In actual fact, all the offences we
take are not about right and wrong. They
are about us not getting our own way which is a different thing. It is our feelings that we are worried about.
The way there are certain offences against us that we don’t mind and
though we say we disapprove of them technically we do not and there are others
that rouse our anger and hatred shows that there is something false about it
when we forgive sins or look for pardon from God. Our forgiveness then is just unjust
discrimination. It is not sins we
forgive at all but our wounded feelings which has nothing to do with sin for
you can feel offended by somebody doing right by you. Then we have the nerve to expect God to
forgive us like we forgive!
When you can’t love your neighbour while hating his sins how can you love
yourself and hate your sins? Religion
and belief in free will are destructive to self-esteem and those who have no
self-esteem or artificial self-esteem are unable to care much for others. Those religionists who have real self-esteem
are only kidding themselves that they are religionists for they cannot believe
in free will and therefore they cannot believe in religion. They just go along with it as if they do
though they may not consciously see it.
Because Jesus gave himself up for others without any thought for himself,
it follows that the Christian must forgive not to get rid of the grudge or the
pain of being hurt or hating a person, but for the other person’s sake. You forgive your enemy not to help yourself
but for their sake so that you can give them the love they don’t deserve. To give a person a love they don’t deserve is
to give them a love they don’t deserve from you either and is therefore loving
your neighbour MORE than yourself. It is
making an effort and risking yourself for somebody that could throw it back in
your face and use you. If this were
better known and the Church were more honest, people wouldn’t be fooled into
thinking that the forgiving advice is good advice. Most believers think they can and should
forgive for their own sake so as not to be caught up in bitterness and
fear. To forgive for that reason is
really more about doing yourself a favour than loving your enemy. Christ commanded the love of enemies. For us unbelievers, we just care about a
person changing. We let the past go for
that reason. because we believe life on
earth is short and the only life we have, we don’t want to bring stress into it
by harbouring grudges.
Love is not liking (page 75, Ecumenical Jihad). That is what the Church says. But that teaching does not wash with most
people.
I define love as not voluntary sacrifice but as feeling pleasure in the
well-being of myself and others. Those
who say love does not like are fooling us because you have to at least like a
person a tiny hardly detectable bit to be willing to help them in any way. Love is liking. This means then that love is a feeling. It is valuing yourself and not the other
person because you only like them for your own fulfilment and not theirs. Strictly speaking when you say you like them
it is really yourself that you like. You
like only what is in them that reminds you of what you like about yourself. It follows then there is no point in trying
to love God for to love him is to put him first and you can’t do that.
Love is selfishness and those who say it is being other-centred are
misleading us.
People prefer to be liked than to be loved. The wife who has a husband who behaves
lovingly towards her without emotion will not be happy and will be unable to
appreciate him. She would rather she had
a man who made mistakes but who liked her a lot.
If you really love your neighbour as yourself which means that you want
to make your neighbour as happy as yourself then you have to like her a
lot. You will not be of much practical
use to your neighbour unless you like her as much as you like yourself.
If you dislike your neighbour enough and cannot stand her then it is
hardly loving yourself to be kind to her.
Jesus who certainly divorced love from liking never had a clue what he
was talking about when he commanded that we love all people. That is no surprise for the man was
definitely mentally ill if he existed.
His doctrines that we could do nothing right unless God helped us to be
good and that we are an evil generation plainly suggest we should not like
ourselves much and in that case we can’t love or like our neighbour much
either. What Jesus and God give with one
hand they take away with the other.
So back to the Church. The Church
must mean that you can love a person you really don’t like when it says that
love is not liking. Some say that to
love the person you must like the fact that that person is living so you have
to like everybody on some level. That
would imply you are not allowed to wish that person had never came into
existence. But you can love while
feeling nothing for the person at all, end of story, if love is not liking.
The Church says that to love God is not to feel love for him but to will
what he wills. We can love God while
feeling hatred for him. The heart and
the will – that part of you that does the choosing – do not always agree. If you love God just to gain some benefit
then you don’t love God at all.
The Church says there is more love in doing favours for one you dislike
intensely than there is for helping one you like. Why?
Because there is a greater sacrifice and a greater triumph over evil
feelings that try to stop you being kindly.
To be less loving than more loving is a sin. It follows that we should like nobody and the
more feelings of hatred we bear towards them the better. It is a sin to like being loving for that
reduces the value of the sacrifice. The
more you dislike God the more you will love him in doing good for it becomes a
really difficult sacrifice.
Even if we can
love the sinner and not love the sin we cannot like the sinner and dislike the
sin. Loving sinners means trying to
change them not treating them as if their sin doesn’t matter which would be
unloving. Liking them is feeling that
they are great. If they are sinners they
are not great. Liking them is liking
their sins too. You don’t mind them
doing anyone a disservice as long as it is not you on the receiving end.
Religion tries to
warm people’s hearts by telling them that God loves them no matter what they
do. This is a cunning deception for the
people will understand love to mean liking.
People go on about looking for love but they mean love as in being liked
a great deal. We would rather do without
what religion sees as love in order to be liked than to be loved but
disliked. If nobody liked us we would be
extremely unhappy and maladjusted.
Love your neighbour as yourself sounds good. It looks good and is one of the principal
reasons why the Church never died out ages ago.
Expose it and the Church will wither away. It is better to cherish your neighbour
because you cherish yourself for all love, meaning liking, starts with
self-love. You like yourself and that
makes you reach out to help other people for that is part of liking yourself by
making friends. All love is self-love.
Prayer requires that you forgive for you would have a nerve asking God
for mercy or any favour when you withhold mercy or pardon yourself so prayer is
hypocrisy. All prayers, even prayers
that you will get a bicycle for your birthday, are ultimately prayers for
mercy. It’s a prayer that God will give
you a gift that you don’t deserve because of your sins. God has forgiven you all your life and will
forgive you even if you commit murder so you can’t approach him without
forgiving. Christians are not that
forgiving so we know then their prayers are a waste of time and insult God.
People have been misled by the clergy to promote the God belief in order
to promote forgiveness in society. What
the belief does is actually pull it down.
It makes God unlikeable for he must be the sternest being in the
cosmos. If people can see that they will
soon stop letting the clergy, religion and God having any influence on their
lives. The baptismal fonts will soon be
consigned to the museum. When religion
is to be so unpleasant it is clear that it is only meant for a handful and only
adults should be joining up instead of babies being initiated at baptism.
The Satanic Bible is
right when it maintains that praying for your enemies is just a polite way of
showing you hate their guts (page 42).
This is only applicable to believers in free will or the supporters of
that poisonous doctrine who may not necessarily believe. But hatred that is disguised like that is far
more dangerous than hatred that is openly shown. At least then you can see it and do something
about it. You can only love your sinners
and hate their sins if you become mad.
But the Church says it is not love to do something like that to yourself
for another and you do not love them. So
you cannot win. Loving the sinner and
hating the sin infers that the individual has no rights and should forsake them
just for the sake of giving sinners love they don’t care if they never
get. It’s hardcore altruism, the belief
that you should do good for others and take no pleasure in it so that you get
nothing out of it and don’t ever intend to.
The
When you hate anything, you are
afflicting yourself. Hate, no matter
what it is directed at, isn’t a very wholesome or nice sensation. It eats you up and damages your regard for
yourself and your relationship with others.
Christian double standards call you to love your enemy and hate eternal
punishment and hate sin which takes people to this punishment. So they bid you to forgive your enemy for
your own peace of mind, and urge you to hate something far more strongly than
you would them! Very helpful! Even if you forgive, there is plenty else to
eat you up so what’s the point?
Forgiveness for Christians is meant to unite them to God so it is a
prayer itself. Christian forgiveness is
about reconciling you to God and you are meant to be reconciled to others not
for them or yourself but for God. Being
reconciled with them is just a means of being at peace with God for he commands
that you reconcile with your enemies. So
you have to forgive because you hate sin for the sake of God. Forgiveness is not one act but a series of
acts – it has to be kept up. So you
inflict this pain of hate just for God on yourself. Christian forgiveness is anything but love
for love should be about yourself for all love starts with self-love not
God. Forgiveness, if bad in a Christian
context, means that I am using it as net of evil in which to catch my enemies
for Christian forgiveness is meant to make others forgiving too.
If God exists we can sin for we would then have free will.
Sin is offending God by doing wrong.
The Bible says that we are all totally depraved monsters, creatures
capable only of sin. It teaches that
everything we do is evil though we can be good but won’t be unless God lends us
his grace (supernatural help).
In Romans 3, we are told that no one on earth does good – no one at all
which is why all need a saviour. We are
even told that the righteous acts of the saved are stained by sin (1 John
1:8).
If we are all sinners like Bible religion would have us believe, then to
be happy is to reward your sins. It is
taking happiness and refusing to make God happy which is insulting him. To punish yourself would be wrong because you
can repent and cleanse your heart of all sin instead of inflicting unnecessary
suffering on yourself. (I suppose if you
can’t resist sin as many religions say you can’t due to original sin then it is
right to punish yourself.) You have to
feel nothing and regret and apologise to God for the emotions you could not
help. And there is something else, you
have to suffer to love which, of course, is not punishing yourself.
Obviously, this argument is still true when you are not talking about
freely hurting a God but a human being or a race of benevolent
extra-terrestrials who allegedly care for us.
Pleasure is wrong if you are a naughty free agent no matter who you are
horrible to.
If emotion is allowed then we should feel hate for sin until we fall
ill. The more we hate sin the
better. The less we hate it the more we
love it and the more we sin. The divine
injunction to refrain from sin means almost dying of hate.
If it is wrong for sinners to be happy then it is wrong to make them
happy. If it is wrong to make sinners
sad that is a sin too. So sinners have
to be neither helped or hindered. They
have to be forgotten about. The only
time they should be remembered is when you have the chance to inform them about
why one does neither good or evil to them to try and prevent them from going
deeper into sin. The consistent
Christian cannot say that God put us on earth to help one another – except to
see us love one another – for Bible Christianity condemns the whole world as
sinful.
But what if ignoring sinners makes them happy or sad? That is not our fault but theirs. We are doing our best not to be a blessing or
a curse for them. What we are not doing
is still must likely to have the desired effect.
Religion is not afraid to point out the hatred of God implied in taking
blessings from him when one bears ill will towards him. There is a double-standard for it never says
the same about taking blessings from sinners which is complementing them on
being decent when they are sinners and not decent.
The smug who say, “Oh, we used to be sinners but we are something now”,
should eat their words after what comes next.
The Christians cannot be blamed for thinking that once God has forgiven
them that they are allowed to grab happiness whenever they can. “The past has been dealt with and the sins
are pardoned. There is no use in being
punished for them anymore”.
Even if you are forgiven for your sins it is decency and gratitude to
make up for them. Because you have done
what is very bad you have to make a big sacrifice of painful goodness to thank
God. It is not punishing yourself but
you have to suffer in order to love. You
are trying to reward God but not to punish yourself.
Happiness is
iniquitous for sinners and former sinners who experience it are still
sinners.
To love one sinner and hate the sin and not to love another and hate his
sin is unfair and even more so if the person who is loved has done worse than
the latter. But we all do it. Religion says everybody is a sinner. We always hurt others because of something we
don’t like in them which is worse than hating a person because of their
sin. If I treat my wife badly though she
is kind to me it is because I do not appreciate her - I do not like her for
what she does for me though I may like the benefits. To offer unfair love to a person who deserves
love is not love at all. It is an
egotistic shot at manipulation. Anybody
who believes he or she is a sinner simply cannot love the sinner but hate the
sin. Any love he or she has is
self-deceit.
CONCLUSION
The doctrines of God, sin and forgiveness of sins have absurd implications. The intelligent cannot be said to take them seriously. It is easy for religion to make people feel they cannot love the sinner and hate the sin. They might take religion seriously on sin but not on loving the sinner. Thus they could end up hating the sinner.
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12/06/08