hate the sin hate the sin but love the sinner i ve heard that quite a bit recently often in the context of discussions about christianity and homosexuality but the context really isn t that important my question is whether that statement is consistent with christianity i would think not hate begets more hate never love consider some sin i ll leave it unnamed since i don t want this to digress into an argument as to whether or not something is a sin now lets apply our hate the sin philosophy and see what happens if we truly hate the sin then the more we see it the stronger our hatred of it will become eventually this hate becomes so strong that we become disgusted with the sinner and eventually come to hate the sinner in addition our hatred of the sin often causes us to say and do things which are taken personally by the sinner who often does not even believe what they are doing is a sin after enough of this the sinner begins to hate us they certainly don t love us for our constant criticism of their behavior hate builds up and drives people away from god this certainly cannot be a good way to build love in the summary of the law christ commands us to love god and to love our neighbors he doesn t say anything about hate in fact if anything he commands us to save our criticisms for ourselves so how are christians supposed to deal with the sin of others i suppose that there is only one way to deal with sin either in others or ourselves through prayer we need to ask god to help us with our own sin and to help those we love with theirs only love can conquer sin hatred has no place the best way to love someone is to pray for them scott this is my signature there are many like it but this one is mine scott holt internet scott prism gatech edu georgia tech uucp gatech prism scott office of information technology technical services
