Galatians 5: Hatred, Love, And Nuance

It is absolutely logically possible to hate and love something at once, like an addiction, a memory, a possession, or a person.  This is a fact separate from whether it is morally right to avoid hatred, but there is no contradiction in this.  Hating someone does not require that one also does not love them.  This refutes one basis for people claiming the Bible's commands to love, which start in the Old Testament's Mosaic Law that is supposedly unloving in its moral stances (Leviticus 19:18, Deuteronomy 6:5, and 10:19, reiterated again in the likes of Matthew 22:34-40 and Romans 13:8-10), exclude hating someone no matter what they believe or do or how one expresses or controls this attitude/emotion.  This is sheer stupidity.

Now, when Galatians 5:19-20 says hatred is among the acts or manifestations of the flesh (sin), it is not condemning all hatred.  This is not even particularly difficult to establish!  First, I will point out the example of another act of the flesh condemned here and how this is limited to a particular context rather than a universal prohibition, and then I will show how what follows in the very same chapter of Galatians already undermines the idea that all hatred is declared evil here, and afterward I will point out the many Biblical passages in favor of hatred on a selective basis.  In fact, it is not that Yahweh is hateful just because he is intolerant of immorality, as some might think.  Hatred for certain people is literally said to be a core part of his character.

As for the aforementioned analogous example, along with hatred, discord is mentioned in Galatians 5:20 as resulting from a sinful disposition.  Nevertheless, Jesus himself came to bring disunity between his followers and their own hostile family members (Matthew 10:34-37), with the Law he himself openly affirms (5:17-19, 15:1-20, 18:16, Mark 7:1-13) requiring that people be opposed to their own family members or anyone else who sins in certain ways (Deuteronomy 13:6-10).  Unity in anything but the truth could only be philosophically invalid to start with since it is erroneous and baseless: this is true by logical necessity independent of the Bible one way or another and is only rejected by shallow irrationalists.  If discord in Galatians 5:20 does not mean all discord, though, the same could already be true of hatred.

Furthermore, when Galatians 5:22 later lists love among the fruits of the Spirit, is it saying all forms and objects of love are good or obligatory?  Of course not!  To love sin is to love that which should not be done, and the Torah clarifies many things well ahead of the often vague New Testament (after all, almost all facets of Biblical morality were already elaborated upon earlier) regarding what is and is not sinful--and it is not what many so-called Christians and non-Christians think in their stupor of confusing hearsay and cultural norms for Christian ethics.  If by necessity not every kind of love is prescribed or encouraged in Galatians 5:22, then not every kind of hatred would have to be condemned slightly earlier in the text.  Even within the very same chapter, there is nothing that would suggest to a rationalistic reader (one who avoids assumptions) that all hatred, regardless of the motivation, expression, or who/what it is directed towards, is evil.

Obviously, other parts of the Bible already very explicitly say that God hates sinners and not just their sin, the latter of which can only exist because of a morally wayward being to begin with.  Sin on the level of concrete thoughts and actions does not merely exist apart from a conscious being that violates an obligation (that which should be done).  Leviticus 20:23, Deuteronomy 22:5, 25:13-16, Psalm 5:5-6, 11:5, Proverbs 3:32, 11:20, and so on say that God does hate specific people.  This does not mean he does not love them, and it is clarified elsewhere that he does and shows mercy because of it (John 3:16, 1 Timothy 2:3-6, 2 Peter 3:8-9), although love is not something he harbors for every person equally (Psalm 103:11).  This is based on their philosophical and behavioral decisions rather than on the unjust delusion of Calvinistic arbitrariness (beyond some of the earlier verses, see Acts 17:30 and Revelation 22:17).

Since righteousness is being in alignment with God's moral nature (which is immutable and devoid of evil according to Malachi 3:6 and James 1:17), hatred cannot possibly be universally, inherently sinful, and some Biblical verses go further to acknowledge this.  David exults in Psalm 139:21-22 about how he hates God's enemies.  Proverbs 29:27 says the righteous and wicked despise each other.  This is intrinsically erroneous on the part of the wicked, but righteous on the part of the truly upright.  Romans 12:9 says to abhor what is evil, and many people themselves are evil, with evil not even being capable of existing apart from a wicked mind (it is still not "nothing" as idiots like Saint Augustine suppose).  Ecclesiastes 3:8 says there is a time for hatred.  Hatred is not something that Galatians 5 or anywhere else in the Bible condemns without exception, and it is very apparent that it teaches hatred can be righteous.  It simply does not prescribe it as mandatory.