You can't punch ideas. You can only punch people.

in #hatred18 days ago

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You know, an aphorism that I was brought up with was, "Hate the sin, love the sinner." That's stuck with me. It's become even more true to me after reading more philosophy outside of The Bible.

I can say that I hate actions and I hate certain ideas. I understand why people hate people, or worse -- groups of people. I can say that I find some people to be insufferable. There are people who are disgusting. There are people with despicable ideas. There are people who do terrible things for terrible reasons. There are people who should die in prison. There are people who create situations in which is entirely justified to kill them on the spot.

The thing about hate toward people, rather than hate toward ideas, is that it seems that people who hate people -- or groups of people -- have crossed a razor-thin line between reason and delusion. What's obscene about this is that people can express hate toward people in a kind voice. People can cloak the hate in a veneer of kindness. If somebody says that you should cut off friends and family if they're voting for Trump, because they haven't "Found a kindness." or whatnot -- they are expressing hate while pretending to be kind.

Hating people makes no sense to me. I've been vocally pro-Israel; but, I don't hate the people of the Gaza or the West Bank. The world was clearly made a better place when Sinwar died. Most of the hate that I've seen directed at people has come from the anti-Israel, leftists side, which seems to pride itself on kindness and open mindedness.

When it comes to hating people, we have to understand that none of us chose our parents, none of us chose where we were born, none of us chose the conditions that we were born into, none of us chose our skin color -- none of us got to choose our own brains.

In so many ways, hating a person for anything that that person says or does is like hating a broken machine or hating a rabid dog. You scrap the broken machine, and you kill the rabid dog; but, you don't do it out of hate.

Yes, humans are the most intelligent animals of which we're aware. We should be held to higher standards. The power of reason pretty much only exists with us. Still, even when it comes to people who reason their way into doing something bad, and did so without having mental defects, nature and nurture are both things that make us products of circumstances beyond our full control.

I absolutely believe that there are a lot of people out there are willfully lying in order to gaslight us into supporting bad behaviors, and even being okay with causing harm to innocent people. Those are my least favorite people; but, their brains are wired differently than mine. If I had been born with a different brain, I might be one of those people. If I were born into a family with bad ethics, and they taught me from the beginning that we're superior people, and we're the elite, and it's okay to lie in order to make things work in a way that you think is better, that would be hard to deprogram.

The people who are all about "science" and tolerance and kindness (at least in their rhetoric) shouldn't be the, "Punch a Nazi" types, or the types who are harassing random Jews just for being Jews.

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