"For God so loved the world that
he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but
have eternal life. John 3:16
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul
and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is
this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than
these." Mark 12:30-31
Now that I come to
think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate
a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the
sin but not the sinner.
For a long time I used
to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a
man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was
one man to whom I had been doing this all my life—namely myself. However much I
might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself.
There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason
why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I
was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things. Consequently,
Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for
cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said
about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way
in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done
such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime,
somewhere he can be cured and made human again.
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