“Love the sinner, hate the sin” is bullcrap. To even get this to work you have to either stretch the meaning of “love” way past its breaking point, or the kind of love you apply has to be a mindless impersonal affection that you spray randomly in all directions. It’s meaningless to me to “love a stranger” and it’s insane to love someone you think is doing something evil. It’s the kind of doublethink and cognitive dissonance that religion demands of people. “You do evil things and I don’t even know you, but I love you anyways because my imaginary mind-reading dictator demands that I do so!” I have my doubts how close anyone really comes to actually feeling love for everyone just because they will themselves to.

That said, I think religion is a very bad thing, but I’ve met many religious people that I thought were very good people. How can I reconcile this in my mind? How is “like the religious person, dislike the religion” different from “love the sinner, hate the sin”?

The way I justify this to myself is to say that most religious people aren’t that religious. Most religious people are hypocrites; they don’t really live by the precepts of their religions; they don’t really even try. And hypocrisy in general isn’t the worst trait in the world, and in fact in this sense is probably a good thing; if they claim to believe something bad but don’t actually believe it, good.

The people who really ARE religious, e.g. the ones pushing creationism in schools and killing their children for god, those are the people I do really think are horrible people. No matter how friendly or otherwise good you are, I don’t know if I could tolerate you if you think gay people deserve eternal hellfire and women are property of men because Jesus said so, and go about trying to make the rest of the world behave according to those kinds of horrible rules.

But this seems flimsy and borderline No True Scotsman fallacy. (Is it still a fallacy if I tell it to myself?) Discuss.

This rant was originally written by Lazy Hobo Brian. It is faithfully reproduced here by his underappreciated slave monkey.