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.<\/p>\n
For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction:\u00c2\u00a0 how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man?\u00c2\u00a0 But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life — namely myself.\u00c2\u00a0 However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself.\u00c2\u00a0 There had never been the slightest difficulty about it.\u00c2\u00a0 In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man.\u00c2\u00a0 Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.\u00c2\u00a0 Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery.\u00c2\u00a0 We ought to hate them.\u00c2\u00a0 Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid.\u00c2\u00a0 But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves:\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
— C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, <\/em>quoted in A Year with C. S. Lewis, <\/em>edited by Patricia S. Klein, p. 226<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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:\u00c2\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,11,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-core-value","category-forgiveness","category-love"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}