“Love the sinner, hate the sin” is a ploy to avoid admitting that your feelings against sinners are something personal.
A lot of confusion is sown around how the person you see as sinning will be doing good a lot of the time. That is thin for Christianity in particular goes too far in saying sin is bad. Jesus said that lustful looks were adultery and deserved Gehenna for example.
Think about this.
John is evil not because he always commits evil acts, but because his existence is fundamentally tied to a singular, horrific purpose — to destroy Mary. Even when he does good or lives without awareness of this purpose, the core of his being serves that end. His goodness is incidental; his role, whether he knows it or not, is inherently destructive.
Once you say there is a divine purpose, that sin is real, that is
what you are taking a baby step towards. There is no excuse for
taking such a step.
In fairness though, religion is building on a human problem.
We are inherently creatures that define a person by the one bad
thing they did.
Religion advocates cool aggression and dresses it up so that it still manages to come up smelling of roses. I am referring to its doctrine: “Hate the sin but love the sinner.” To hate is to oppose the wellbeing of. To oppose the wellbeing of anything is an act of violence. The absurdity of hating a thing and wanting to hurt it does not mean you cannot be stirring up love of violence in you. It means you are stirring it up because stirring up such emotions is irrational anyway.
Christianity shouts, "Love the sinner and detest the sin!" the loudest. Hate means to dislike intensely and with violence of emotion, not necessarily action. Religion commands hating the sin. If we do this, then it is really treating sin like a thing. To hate a thing like sin is irrational. You cannot hate a thing and be rational. When we hate a thing, it is because an irrational emotion has kicked in. The hate is emotional, but it is not us being truly ourselves. Proper hate involves and necessitates us being truly ourselves. Religion warns that you can hate the sinner and imagine you hate the sin, not the sinner. It admits that anything can be counterfeited and warns us that our hearts can fool us.
To pretend the sin is not part of the sinner actually means you refuse to look at how you can hurt the sinner by hurting and hating it. It contradicts the alleged love you have for the sinner. It puts the sinner at risk of suffering at your hands. Or perhaps you will give at least passive support by silence if other people hurt her or him. “Love the sinner and hate the sin” could be the principle behind our tendency to be kind to people while at the same time being absolutely delighted should somebody hurt them and inflict misfortune on them. We hate them but are too smug and keen on looking good, but not on being good in reality, to actually make that hate obvious and put it into violent action.
When somebody hates your sin, you can be sure that it is you they really hate. We all know that to hate sin is personal, for it feels personal. If you really separate the sin from the sinner, you will feel about the sin the same way you would about the book that falls on your head. But you know it feels personal. Christianity calls on you to lie to be a Christian by pretending that it doesn’t. You don’t forgive the book for falling on you, for it is not a person. You don’t resent the book. If a person dropped the book on you out of spite, you would resent the person. You cannot forgive the sinner unless you hate them first, at least a little bit. Christianity offers only pretend forgiveness, which is why it never lasts and never takes away the resentment, which soon explodes in religious bigotry or some other form.
Religion argues, "Cancer isn’t bad. It is just something that is living and growing in the wrong place. It’s the place that is wrong, not the cancer, for life and growth are good. Therefore, you cannot hate cancer. You hate its consequences but not the cancer. You don’t have anything personal against the cancer or its wrongness." The hater of sin does not hate only the consequences of the sin but the sin itself. The consequences are not the sin — and it is a fact that if bad things happen to you following your sin, it does not follow that your sin is to blame for all of it. The hater of sin hates it as a needless, deliberate, punishable evil. He or she hates the person who chose to do the evil, for sin is essentially an evil choice. It is personal. If you really loved the sinner, you wouldn’t be able to have a personal hatred of the sin.
Compassion for the sinner and not the sin makes no sense. It means you have compassion for the sin and hardness of heart and coldness towards the sinner as if the sin were a person. It is not the sin that is getting the hardness and coldness but the person. Compassion for the sinner is extremely patronising and unloving. Compassion is only due to people who experience misfortune that is not their own fault or who seek and need help now even if it was their fault, for they cannot change the past. It can only be given to people who are afflicted with evils that they cannot stop. Can you have compassion for an intelligent man who goes to an exam and deliberately messes it up? Compassion for sinners insults them by saying it was not their own fault. If it is not their own fault, then they are not sinners, so what is the compassion all about? Who would want compassion from people who act as if they couldn’t help sinning? Christianity is pure hypocrisy and is pretending to feel a compassion it does not feel at all.
The advice “hate the sin and love the sinner” demands that you don’t hate the person to any degree at all, which is impossible if you hate the sin. So it condemns you as bad. It brings turmoil on you. It is turning anger into yourself. It makes you a time bomb. To hate outright would possibly result in less harm overall.
Nothing can be more ridiculous than saying you trust the sinner but not the sinner’s sins. It is the sinner you mistrust, not the sins. How can you mistrust sins? They are not people or robots. Mistrust here is a personal feeling and verdict; it can only be personal and involve persons.
To succeed in being angry at the sin and not the sinner would actually show you have damaged yourself psychologically. That could lead to you becoming a danger to perceived sinners, as you are not well in the mind and are trying to make yourself worse. To love a sinner by making yourself ill is a strange kind of love. If you would do that to yourself, it's only a short step towards starting to do it to others.
Hatred is a form of warped love. That is why indifference — not giving a toss about a person if they live or die or are happy or not — is the real opposite of love. The person who hates you hates you because of something you support, are a part of, or do. They do not hate you because you are a person. They attack you and are angry at you because of something else. There is no difference between this and loving the sinner and hating the sin.
Nobody feels loved when somebody claims to hate their sin and to love them. If you oppose the sin like you oppose a mistake, the person could feel loved, but that is not hating the sin. In hatred for the sin, you are asked to hate sin, not just oppose it. It feels like personal hatred or hatred for the person.
With the “love the sinner and hate the sin” ideology, it is no wonder some people are conditioned to swallow the lie, "I only hurt you because I was taking my problems out on you. It was not personal! Love me for I don’t hate you, and consider me separate from what I did to you, for it was not about hurting you." People have to suffer and be manipulated because religious believers want to maintain their hypocritical pleasures and holy standing!
The madness of “love the sinner and hate the sin” shows the power of religious manipulation and conditioning. When the conditioning is that strong and dangerous, religion should be opposed as full of harmful potential.
Do you love your father when he does acts of great evil? It is possible to feel both love and hate for a person. It is possible to treat them deliberately badly out of love. When people say they love their evil children but hate their sins, what they really mean is that they love and hate them at the same time. It is not the sins they hate but them. To hate the sin is always to hate the sinner, even if there is a part of you that loves them. The advice “hate the sin and love the sinner” demands that you don’t hate the person to any degree at all. All that does is screw up the relationships. Many of us do great good because we both love and hate our families and friends. The gentle soul is the one that will let a friend throw her life down the drain.
If you dislike a person's sin, they will take it personally. They will be hurt when you hate their sins. Do not bully them into feeling any different by saying, "You cannot have the right to take it so personally; I hate your sin, not you." That only makes it worse.
Love is not liking. The difference is this: love is doing whatever is needed for the wellbeing of another. Liking is about feeling good towards another person, and you can like a person and not help them.
You cannot like the sinner and dislike their sin, so how can you love the sinner and hate the sin? If you dislike the sin and still like the sinner as much as ever, then it follows that you don't dislike the fact that they committed the sin but that the sin had unpleasant results. So it is not the sin at all you dislike. The sin is not an action or the results of sin but something that a person becomes. To dislike or hate the sin is to dislike or hate the sinner.
Summary of Conclusion:
The phrase “love the sinner, hate the sin” masks the reality that hatred of sin is inherently personal and inevitably extends to the sinner themselves. Attempts to separate sin from the sinner are ultimately deceptive and harmful, often causing emotional confusion, hypocrisy, and relational damage. True hatred of sin cannot be divorced from feelings toward the person committing it, making the supposed love for the sinner conditional and insincere. Christianity’s insistence on this separation fosters resentment, passive cruelty, and psychological turmoil rather than genuine compassion or forgiveness. Ultimately, love involves doing what is necessary for another’s wellbeing—not merely liking them—and you cannot truly love a person while hating what they fundamentally are through their sin. The call to “hate the sin but love the sinner” is a religious construct that distorts human emotions, relationships, and moral responsibility.