How Religious People Fake Humility

 

Christianity commands that you love the sinner and hate the sin.

 

Love the sinner and hate the sin claims to be a recipe for humility.  By loving the sinner you are supposed to avoid pridefully hating the sinner when you are a sinner yourself.  Curiously, if Jesus has taken over your sins and had them credited to his account by dying on the cross to be punished for them by God then it follows that you are no longer really a sinner if you are a Christian and CAN look down on sinners.  For you, your sinful past is now a fiction because of Jesus.  Christians surely must believe that people with mental impairments that prevent them from sin have the right to hate sinners. 

 

Christian humility is false.  It is really pride in disguise.  You can't believe in humility unless you pridefully believe you have the wisdom to see you should believe.  If the humility didn't make you happy in some way you would not be engaging in it.  You believe you are worthy of happiness which is a form of pride.  Christians say it is a great thing to be humble and holy and kind in private and to hide it from others if possible.  So it is bad to be humble for the sake of wanting others to see it.  That is pride.  The Church will say that justifying this on the basis that others need to see your humility is a subtle form of selfishness and pride.  The Church warns that subtle pride is more dangerous than open brazen pride for it is harder to diagnose and more sneaky and deceptive.  Letting others see you cannot make you proud.   It is only what you think of you that can do that.  So there is more pride in YOU seeing your humility than in others seeing it.  And surely God seeing how humble you are can be more pride for you than others seeing it?  Others only see the outside but God sees the humility you hope is in your heart.  Belief in God then is terrific for those who want to enjoy false humility.  It is great if you want the benefits of pride and being thought and feeling humble while not being really humble.  That way you are getting the best out of pride.  Christianity is not based on God.  It is based on self.  It is not surprising then that Christians and Jews and Muslims spew so much hatred against debunkers of their faiths a hatred that does not exist say in Buddhists or Taoists when their faiths are criticised.

 

Christians and secularists are at war.  The reason for the war all comes down to something very simple.  Christians claim that God created them and revealed their religion.  Secularists claim that Christians created their version of God and their religion.  The Christians say that they are right for God told them what is right and he knows best.  The secularists are saying that Christians are inventing their faith and should not be permitted to enforce their ideas on society not even legally.  Secularism should listen to religion but as one thing among many things that should be given a hearing.  Secularism is not perfect and nobody should claim that it is.  But to try and judge what should be allowed or not allowed without religious prejudices and taboos is better than letting religions rule the day with all their different rules and lies and infighting and confusion.  For example, if a secularist has to work out if contraception is good or bad or neutral he or she should do it on earthly grounds and not be worrying about the command of a religion requiring her or him to forbid contraception.  Nothing will get done if we start complicating things with religion.  It is not intolerance but necessity that requires the secular voice to be the loud voice and the voice that is heard.  We need to forget about God and religious taboos and work out what is best for society.

 

Religion is not humble when men make it and claim that God revealed it.

 

Remember, the following is hypothetical: If there was any hope of loving the sinner and hating the sin, it would follow that the more certain you are that an act in question is sinful then the more you can love the sinner.  That is because the more you doubt or are unsure that the act is sinful, the more you intend an injustice and intend hatred for the person.  Nobody would believe you if you accused somebody of a sin on very little evidence and maintained that you loved that person.  So the person who has strong evidence that x is doing wrong loves x more than the person who has less evidence that x is doing wrong.  The love would only be complete if there was absolute proof that x was doing wrong.  Love the sinner and hate the sin is based then on self-righteousness and the imaginary superiority of those who preach it.

 

Religion is full of rules it cannot prove.  Who can prove that it is wrong to miss Mass on Sunday?  Who can prove that it is wrong to let a day pass by without praying?  Who can prove that artificial birth control is a sin?  Who can prove that it is sinful to believe that a freshly fertilised egg is not a human person with as many rights as a grown up human person?  Who can prove that it is sinful to disagree with Jesus who said that whoever doesn't believe in him and all he says is condemned by God?  The more rules there are, the more the claim to love the sinner can be doubted.  Against psychology, Roman Catholicism says that if you commit a mortal sin you are completely opposing God - if that were true such sinners would not be praying for the grace of repentance!  And it is said to be immoral to disagree with the Church!  It is best to have as  few rules as possible and to have only well-authenticated ones. Religion puts more blocks in the way of loving the sinner as if there are not enough already.   A faith that condemns actions, and therefore people, when it can't prove its message is not humble.  Far from it.

 

Christianity gives no proof that its faith is the true faith.  It says God does miracles to verify the faith.  But if the faith was good and was sensible and the alternatives bad then God doing miracles is really a sign of his failure to teach it properly and provide for its accurate dissemination.  Those who speak of miracles happening are not being humble simply because God can't be doing the miracles.  They must be deceived or lying.

 

Religion counsels us to hate the sin but love the sinner.  This is absurd as saying, "I disapprove of the sin but not the sinner".  It is as absurd as saying, "I disapprove of the sin but not the action."  And as absurd and two-faced as, "Hate the sinner and love the person".  The counsel is a sign of religion's lack of humility.

 

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BOOKS CONSULTED

 

BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, Friedrich Nietzsche, Penguin, London, 1990

CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, Veritas, London, 1995 

ECUMENICAL JIHAD, Peter Kreeft, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1996

GOD IS NOT GREAT, THE CASE AGAINST RELIGION, Christopher Hitchens, Atlantic Books, London, 2007

HANDBOOK OF CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, Monarch, East Sussex, 1995 

HOW DOES GOD LOVE ME?  Radio Bible Class, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1986 

IN DEFENCE OF THE FAITH, Dave Hunt, Harvest House, Eugene, Oregon, 1996 

MADAME GUYON, MARTYR OF THE HOLY SPIRIT, Phyllis Thompson, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1986 

MORAL PHILOSOPHY, Joseph Rickaby SJ, Stonyhurst Philosophy Series, Longmans Green and Co, London, 1912 

OXFORD DICTIONARY OF PHILOSOPHY, Simon Blackburn, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996 

PRACTICAL ETHICS, Peter Singer, Cambridge University Press, England, 1994 

PSYCHOLOGY, George A Miller, Penguin, London, 1991 

REASON AND BELIEF, Brand Blanschard, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1974 

REASONS FOR HOPE, Ed Jeffrey A Mirus, Christendom College Press, Virginia, 1982 

THE ATONEMENT: MYSTERY OF RECONCILIATION, Kevin McNamara, Archbishop of Dublin, Veritas, Dublin, 1987

SINNERS IN THE HANDS OF AN ANGRY GOD, Jonathan Edwards, Sword of the Lord, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, undated

THE BRIEF OF ST ANTHONY OF PADUA (Vol 44, No 4) 

THE IMITATION OF CHRIST, Thomas A Kempis, Translated by Ronald Knox and Michael Oakley, Universe, Burns & Oates, London, 1963 

THE LIFE OF ALL LIVING, Fulton J Sheen, Image Books, New York, 1979

THE NEW WALK, Captain Reginald Wallis, The Christian Press, Pembridge Villas, England, undated 

THE PROBLEM OF PAIN, CS Lewis, Fontana, London, 1972 

THE SATANIC BIBLE, Anton Szandor LaVey, Avon Books, New York, 1969 

THE STUDENT’S CATHOLIC DOCTRINE, Rev Charles Hart BA, Burns & Oates, London, 1961

 

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