Monday, May 12, 2025

The Extent Of Divine Hatred

In Mosaic Law, God is said to hate certain people, some of which is reiterated in Psalms or elsewhere.  He is said to abhor people who wear clothing of the opposite gender (Deuteronomy 22:5), deceitful people (Deuteronomy 25:13-16, Psalm 5:6, Proverbs 6:16-19), and people who commit sexually immoral acts such as incest, bestiality, and adultery (Leviticus 20:23 preceded by specific examples of largely consensual sexual sins along with bestiality).  There is no such thing as an inherent contradiction between loving someone and hating them as long as you hate them for the right reasons and never mistreat them, and Yahweh harbors all of these attitudes towards the same people at once (compare John 3:16 or Romans 5:8 with Proverbs 11:20 or any of the aforementioned verses).

Ultimately, the Biblical God hates all unrepentant sinners (Psalm 5:5), but this hatred would have to be proportionate to their beliefs and deeds (Romans 2:6) to be just, so it is not a uniform level of loathing that the petty thief (Leviticus 6:1-5, Numbers 5:5-8) and the slave trader (Exodus 21:16) would receive.  Someone who eats calamari, shrimp, or crab (Leviticus 11:9-12, Deuteronomy 14:9-10) is not as egregious of a sinner as someone who worships other deities or the natural world (Deuteronomy 13:6-10, 17:2-7), so they could not deserve the same level of revulsion.  A murderer deserves more hatred than a trivial liar, but the hatred they deserve is nothing compared to what someone who would torture murderers in unjust ways deserves.

If God hates people who kill the innocent (Psalm 5:6, Proverbs 6:16-17), then he would certainly hate people who commit worse atrocities than murder because the innocence of the victim is wholly irrelevant.  He would have to even more greatly despise people who torture in illicit ways (with some of the only context-permissible types of torture mentioned in Leviticus 24:22-24 or Deuteronomy 13:10, 25:1-3, 11-12), ways that are universally, directly prohibited or excluded by logical necessity from the punishments of the Torah because not even the greatest of sinners could deserve them.  By saying that God specifically hates the people who practice certain sins, and not just the sins alone, the Bible would be teaching that God hates anyone who commits a greater immorality.

If God hates incestuous people, unrepentant adulterers/adulteresses, and people who commit bestiality (the rape of an animal), as Leviticus 20 teaches, then he certainly hates every man or woman who forces themselves sexually on another person regardless of whether it would otherwise have been a permissible encounter (Deuteronomy 22:25-27).  If God hates liars and not just lies, he would of course hate flagrant philosophical hypocrites, who lie to themselves or ignore truths that are absolutely certain if one actually looks to them without assumptions: that it is easy to know one's heart (all one has to do is rationalistically introspect) and that if something is irrational/evil, it is the same for oneself as well.  It already follows separately from Psalm 5:5 that hating certain sinners necessitates the legitimacy or even justice of hating others.

Even so, Yahweh says well ahead of the New Testament that he takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezekiel 33:11), though burning to death in hell is what they deserve for their errors should they not repent (Matthew 10:28, 2 Peter 2:6).  It is possible to hate someone while not only still loving them, but also actively hoping they will turn from what is erroneous to what is true and just.  The Biblical deity is like this.  There is love even amidst hatred and mercy that accompanies fury.  As far as people go, if God hates, then since God is the one whose nature dictates what is good (deviation from this being evil), it cannot be intrinsically evil for humans to hate as well if they channel this in the right direction and never let it spur them on to irrationality, emotionalism, or injustice.  How unpopular almost all of this would be in many churches!

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