Hate is one of the seven deadly sins for a reason. It is inappropriate when it affects your ability to make rational decisions. When important decisions or policies are made based on your hatred it's destructive. Example, a 40 + year old embargo on Cuba that has, in all likelihood, done more to keep Castro in power these many years is based on nothing more then the blind hatred of the man by the Cuban exiles who happen to control a sizable voting block.

Never hate you’re enemies, it affects your judgment.

As for your list I don't hate a lot of those people, mainly because their dead

But in a real practical sense I don’t really hate any of those other people either, because hate, like love, is born out of intimate relationships and I don’t know any of those people. I despise them, I can feel rage over their actions, but hate assumes that I give a shit about them enough to waste precious time and energy in deep thought about them. Which I don’t do, my energies are better spent on other things. So no, I cannot hate those people and I would suggest that if you do you are the one who is ultimately perverse. I can feel hate, but to do so I would have to be close enough to them to potentially love them.

But you go ahead and hate away if it makes you sleep better at night. But I suspect deep down you don’t really hate then either, rather you despise them. Hate is an emotion, despising someone is a reaction to what they have done.

And Pinochet and Videla and Mobutu and Rios Montt and Franco and Salazar and Suharto.

For once, you're right on!

Rick, didn't Jesus say something about "love the sinner but hate the sin"?

So, hating sin is a sin?

And Lefties accuse us Right-wingers of having an un-nuanced view of the world.

Dean, I don't agree with you. But I'm not really sure it would do either of us any good for me to sit here and expound my spiritual and religious beliefs in the comments section of your blog. I'm sorry if that's a cop out, I just wanted to register my dissent.

hate: intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury

Fear should not be the driving force in your life. Give up the crutch of being afraid.

Anger removes the ability to make sound decisions. Clear your mind so you can accept total responsibility for your decisions.

Sense of injury? Unless there IS an injury (really, even if there is) the hate is now wrongfully motivated. Accept responsibilty for you choices. Doing (or feeling) something, like hate, because of a perceived or actual injury does not make much sense. Assuming a person would rather not have the offending behaviour repeated, wouldn't hate get in the way of developing solutions? I know it does.

Eliminating the capacity to hate does not mean something is wrong with you.

Eliminating the capacity to hate does not mean you are perverse (unless, by perverse, you mean different from most people).

Hate is probably a normal emotion. Normal = most people have the emotion.

Hate may be healthy if only as a placeholder for the other end of the scale of which love is the other pole.

Love can become perverse and destuctive, although I wonder if it remains love when it does.

I would say, no, joy is never inappropriate. Appropriate seems to be everyone else's preogative, however, not yours. (not you, Dean, the general you)

I think weeping is self-pity. It all seems excessive. Sometimes feels good though.

When you nurture someone to the point that any behaviour other than what they were exposed to during the nurturing seems perverse, or it seems that there is something wrong with other people for acting the way they do, I would say that is excessive.

Excellent post, Dean. I did think hard on it before answering. Here I was thinking my birthday would go by with nothing fun for me to do.

No military jokes about my 'general you' remark. :)

fourth paragraph - should be your choices, not you choices

Rick:

Hate is one of the seven deadly sins for a reason.

Last time I looked (i.e., last time I preached a Lenten sermon series on them) the traditional seven deadly sins of Christian moral theology were pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. Sometimes with variation in terminology, such as "avarice" for greed, or "acedia" (say what?) for sloth. If you read traditional definitions of the seven deadlies, you will run again and again into the term "inordinate"— that is, they amount to inordinate desires or inordinate appetites.

But to call a desire inordinate is to say that, in some context or other, there is a variation or transform of that desire which may rightly be considered ordinate. I should think that holds not only for the traditional seven, but also for hatred. There are inordinate hatreds, and there are ordinate hatreds. And discerning which is which may sometimes call for a sense of finesse.

Or then again, sometimes (as in the case of Hitler or Stalin) not.

It's funny, I was thinking about this yesterday. I don't think of hate as the polar opposite of love, or as a hot, blindly unreasoning emotion. It can certainly be those things, and when it is it can lead to ruin (as can any strong emotion), but it doesn't have to be that way.

I don't hate anyone I know; it's too strong for that. The people I dislike I can usually just ignore.

The hatred I feel toward Saddam and his murderous sons is a cold, implacable desire to see them dead. His sons are dead, and that makes me happy. When Saddam joins them, after being pumped dry of any useful information, then the world will be a better place. And when the vile terrorists who'd kill the people I love without a second thought join Saddam in eternal torment I'll be glad to see them go.

Those actions are absolutely necessary to remove a terrible danger to myself, my loved ones, and other innocent people. But I'm not a violent person by nature. Cold reason alone may not push me toward finishing the job, and abstract dislike wouldn't motivate me to require such action of my leaders. Cold hatred provides that focus and motivation. That's what hate can do -- for good or for evil.

Rick said: hate, like love, is born out of intimate relationships

I think that Rick has a very valid point. Hate is a very personal and intimate emotion. It is not the polar opposite of love. It is, in fact, very closely related to love. I don't love Ronald Reagan any more than I hate Saddam. Words like loath, despise, and abhor fit my feelings for Saddam perfectly, but not hate. As Bryan points out, emotion is often necessary in making decisions where "Cold reason alone" is not enough, but loathe, despise, and abhor are sufficient for this.

Dean, you do make a great point about the capacity for hatred. You are correct in asserting that hatred is a normal emotion and that someone who lacks the ability to hate has something wrong with them. You don't have to use an ability just because you have it, however. I have the ability to kill but have never used it. There is nothing wrong with trying not to hate or trying to overcome hate. Refusing to try may be very damaging, possibly more damaging than the hate itself.

McGhee,

Did Dean say he hated those people or what they did? If I misread him you're right and I stand corrected. If I did misread him then we basically agree. I hate what those people did to, but I can't hate them for the reasons I listed.

Paul,
You are right of course and I'll concede that point, but I don't think that it makes a lot of difference in what I said, and it really doesn’t change my main point.

You know, it's funny that hate is not one of the seven deadly sins (bitterness may not even be a sin), yet so much of our culture focuses on "ending hate." We have hate crime laws, accuse people of having hate thoughts.

When, as Paul Burgess said, the real sins are pride, anger (wrath), envy, greed, lust, sloth and gluttony. Didn't even crack the top seven.

Hating the sin is OK. I recall reading someone having a lot of fun with this, saying, "Is it OK to hate hate?"

Love the sinner, hate the sin, is the bottom line. It works as a policy whether you are a Christian or not. It separates behavior from individuals and avoids judging the other person's soul, which belongs solely to God. Psychologists will tell you (I know) that judging people is counter-productive: In almost all cases, they won't except the judgment, even if it is true to the nth degree. But if you talk about behavior, you'll get better results.

And if you they don't accept the behavior is wrong, then you know you're dealing with a criminal or a sociopath (technical terms here, not moral ones) and you know they need to be avoided, locked up, or defeated according to their behaviors.

That doesn't mean, Dean, that you aren't entirely human for hating these individuals. I hate many of those you mentioned, though I find I have a very hard time hating an individual, and a much easier time hating an unknown distraction.

An example: I admit I was full of hate for the two snipers before they were caught. They were faceless, cowardly, reckless evil terrorizing our suburbs, and that filled me with an enormous desire for revenge. Once they were faces, that hate dissipated fairly quickly. It was two little shit losers who are thankfully locked up and the keys to be thrown away. Good.

It's part of the banality of evil thing, or what C.S. Lewis talked about when he described how the English would declare hell not hot enough for the German pilots who bombed them, but then would sometimes treat the actual pilots who were shot down. But that's civilization, isn't it?

FWIW.

I can honestly say I hate the actions of those men, but not the men. Its hard to hate a soul when you feel profound pity and regret for the way it has been twisted. I doubt any of those men were born a true-monster. I often wonder what happened to turn them into themselves. Perhaps, there but for the grace-of-god ...

And, yet, hating their actions while feeling pity for the condition of their souls, I hope I would not hesitate to personally slit their throats ear-to-ear if by doing so I could prevent further atrocities. I would take no joy in doing so, but ...

I'm continually surprised by friends that think not-hating is a weakness, the easy way out. Personally, not-hating takes a lot of effort and more than a little help from God. I think it makes me stronger, not weaker.

Rick, I think we've both been reading Dean long enough to have a fair idea of what he means even if he may not always express himself clearly.

He isn't saying he hates people because of their color, or their religion, or their nationality, or (may Kinsell's law have mercy on me) their sexual orientation.

He's talking people who did specific things, or caused specific things to happen, that even Jesus would have hated.

To me, that makes a clear distinction that renders your objection just a tad pedantic.

Speaking for myself, it may be said that I hate Osama bin Laden, because of what he did. Yet while I hate what Michael Jackson is alleged to have done, even if he did it I find that I pity him more than hate him. I hope he gets help, because he obviously is in desperate need of it, even if he never touched a child improperly even once in his life.

I think my feeling about bin Laden is stronger precisely because I take what he did personally. Given what has developed in the discussion here, that would be perfectly valid, if perhaps morally questionable to some.

We are a hate driven society. If you desire to have your life revolve around hate, fear and anger, knock yourself out. I don't see how anything positive will come out of it. There is nothing dark about not falling into a hate trap. In fact, you might find it enlightening.

dean, i absolutely agree with you. Hate, in measured quantities, can be an extraordinary tool in life. The trick is hating that which deserves to be hated. For example, it may be all to easy to transfer a hate of Stalin, or Mao, to a hatred of all slavs or all chinese people. i think it's a real test of someone's character to be able to hate justly. i guess the real problem with hate is that one can only trust himself to use it correctly, and sometimes not even then.

Dean, I know what you mean. I feel the same way about Arsenio Hall.

Hate is perhaps the wrong word, it is an unreasoning response and you are certainly not unreasoning.

A quick thesaurus look-up: abhorrence, animosity, contempt, detestation, disgust, repugnance, repulsion, revulsion, scorn...

It is proper to hate evil people. It is improper to let it consume your life.

I hate Arafat and would kill him without hesitation should I ever have the opportunity. Here in America, I work to support Israel. But I do not let my hatred for Arafat cloud my life, I don't think about him or the Palestinians all the time, that would be unhealthy.

We should hate evil. But that requires the recognition that objective evil exists. And that requires an objective code for judging good and evil.

McGhee,

Actually Dean’s premise was that hate can, in some circumstances be healthy, that it is a natural emotion and that any emotion can be damaging. I never accused Dean of hating those people because of any race or religious characteristics and I don’t presume to guess at what he might mean. Dean tends to write posts in a self-consciously provocative fashion to generate discussion like this but they are not “clear” by any stretch unless you are simply devoid of any imagination. One could look at this post nine ways from Friday and in one sense I think that’s why Dean writes them and its why people like to come here and discuss them.

My response was narrowly focused on purpose in order to highlight and draw a contrast to what I saw as a fairly broad, almost useless definition of hate. Sure in a colloquial sense we all hate people who perpetrate evil as those who Dean listed did, so what? Who doesn’t? And if Dean was talking about that very broad definition of hate then its pretty close to saying the sky is blue.

If Dean was trying to bate someone into saying something like, “hate is such a vile thing that to hold it in your heart is a moral sin” only to shift the definition yet again to make some irrelevant point then again it’s kid of pointless. 99% of all internet arguments boil down to definitions and assumptions. I stated clearly what I talked about how hate was related to love and it was personal.

Now you can take something that somebody did personally but again you’re only talking about hate in a very broad form. People say things like, “Ronald Reagan was loved by many of his countrymen.” But they don’t actually mean love, they typically mean something closer to warmly regarded.

But Dean also was trying to make the case that hate could be, in certain circumstances, a healthy thing and I just don’t see that as being the case. He talked about love being destructive, but one could argue that when love becomes destructive it’s not really love any more, its obsession. Hate is born out of anger, or fear. If dean was trying to say expressing hate, in certain circumstances, can be a good thing, I might go along with that but typically you would express your anger or fear, hate is a result of those emotions it’s not organic.

When you hate you have taken your anger of fear and turned it into to something destructive and, as I quoted from the Godfather” it will affect your judgment. That is why you must never hate your enemy; it gives him power over you. But you go ahead, fill you soul up with all the righteous hatred you can muster an then tell me how that can be of any positive use.

In fact that would be my challenge to Dean, if what he says is true, then he can demonstrate how hate can yield a positive result. If hate is truly a healthy thing then give us a scenario where your hatred of someone made a situation better.

i agree, completely. I think its important to acknowledge and explore every single emotion we're capable of feeling. To take the "bad" ones and deny we have them, or cram them back deep down, that's unhealthy. They end up manifesting themselves in destructive ways when they've been ignored or stuffed away.

Hating someone is like drinking poison and then waiting for the other person to die.

Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to Hatred. Hatred leads to suffering.

Okay, done with that.

Hatred, as an emotion, has always felt wrong. Because hatred of another person is truly jus hatred of yourself.

You don't really hate another person, or their actions. You hate your inability to do something about their actions, or your inability to control your emotions about their actions.

Hatred is truly hatred of self.

I don't hate the people you listed. I know they must be stopped. I know there is an ongoing struggle between their views of the world and mine.

But until I've done more to stop them, I truly am just hating my inability to muster the will to do something about it.

Maybe most of us have lived our lives (thus far) a little too removed from such as Dean's examples.

My next door neighbor, 82 year old Max, made it out of Germany at age 17 in 1939 along with his sister who lives now in New York. The other 19 members of his family did not make it out.

Early in our acquaintance, we offered to celebrate the holidays with him--an invitation to Seder at our house, actually. He declined in tears. He never said so, but it's clear the beloved ritual, the songs, the fellowship and the history are dead to him now. They have been rewired into pure grief.

He hates Hitler with a very present intensity. Tell him he is wrong.

I respectfully submit that, if one hasn't lived at this level one doesn't really know about hatred. One thing is sure though. There would be (have been) that much less hate in the world had Hitler never been. And the others?

"Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to Hatred. Hatred leads to suffering."

I would certainly disagree almost whole-heartedly with this statement. For me, Fear leads to .. fear, and perhaps more fear. It takes Hurt/Injury to get me to Anger. Truely, undissipated Anger leads to Hatred. However, Hatred DOES NOT inherently lead to suffering. It often leads to Action which aleviates the suffering which caused the Anger in the first place.

Come now, Dean.

Kim du Toit can be grumpy, but you shoudln't hate him.

Come now Sigivald, you're accusing Dean of having Kim Wrong Illed

Allison, you are arguing with Yoda, of Star Wars fame.

and, yes, it does.

What Allison said. Twice. I can't seem to lay my hands on my copy of C. S. Lewis' Perelandra at the moment, but there is a passage where the protagonist is in physical combat with a devil in a human body, and experiences a "pure and lawful hatred." As far as I can remember the passage, he "rejoiced in finding what hatred was made for, as a boy with a hatchet rejoices on finding a tree, or a child with a set of colored crayons rejoices on finding a stack of perfectly white paper."

Re "hate the sin, love the sinner," I have never understood why critics of Christianity call this a cop-out. As far as I can see it's the only way of reconciling "God is Love" with "God is Good."

Yoda was a weird little wrinkly green thing living in a murky swamp, eating unappitizing food and so unaccustomed to intelligent contact that he had practically forgotten how to talk. This is NOT my role model :)

“In its place, kept under control like any other emotion, I assert that Hate is a healthy emotion. An utterly appropriate emotion, in fact, so long as, like all other emotions, it is kept in its place.”

Hate is an appropriate (i.e. normal) but not very healthy short-term emotion in very specific circumstances. One of the many opportunities presidential candidate Michael Dukakis took to shoot himself in the ass was when he launched into platitudes about criminal justice and rehabilitation when a debate moderator asked him what he would feel if his wife were raped and murdered (something like that). A good answer would have been: I would have wanted to rip out his liver through his neck but that’s why we don’t have a vigilante-based criminal justice system...

Other than the natural response to a direct assault on someone or something you love, hating another person is neither normal or healthy. Perhaps love can become unbalanced or even perverted, but abstract hate comes twisted right out of the box.

Glad you saw the humour. I wanted to point out that TheYeti was quoting Yoda.

I believe the sentiment. It is true. If you are hating then part of you is railing against the notion that what you hate is ok to someone else. This discombobulation, the inability to reconcile the hated act against your personal worldview, causes suffering. You don't want to suffer. You hate the fact that you suffer. You hate. You suffer.

It's slick, sick and cyclic. Just ask Rick.

In fact that would be my challenge to Dean, if what he says is true, then he can demonstrate how hate can yield a positive result. If hate is truly a healthy thing then give us a scenario where your hatred of someone made a situation better.

I was just noticing that Dean hasn't added anything yet to his post, neither as an update nor (according to my browser's Find function) in comments, which in my opinion makes further discussion a little pointless.

And I'll second Rick's request for examples. I think they do exist, but Dean will have to start defending his thesis here.

Oh, and Rick? It's McGehee. Please.

"abhorrence, animosity, contempt, detestation, disgust, repugnance, repulsion, revulsion, scorn..."

That's exactly what I feel whenever I think of Auschwitz. If you don't feel that when _you_ think of Auschwitz, what are you? Some emotionless robot? Those who cannot hate cannot love.

Dean is absolutely right. I'm proud to say that I am a man of hate. I hate all Nazis and I hate all Communists. I hate every one of the pig-fuckers Dean mentioned.

To love is to value. Love is the most profoundly selfish emotion there is. Therefore, when you love (value) something or someone, you necessarily hate that which attacks, undercuts, negates, destroys that which/whom you love. E.g., I love beauty, therefore I hate ugliness. And the highest, holiest, most intense, most exclusive, most totally committed type of love is romantic love, sexual love.

I am proud to say that I hate everyone who hates sex and is trying to negate sexual love, sexual passion. I love sexuality, heterosexuality, homosexuality, androsexuality, gynosexuality, Lesbianism, tribadism -- holy, beautiful tribadism! -- and I therefore hate all the enemies of holy tribadism. The enemies of the Lesbian are my enemies. I love beauty and passion and I hate the enemies of beauty and passion. I am proud to say that I am passionate in defense of passion. I must love passionately and, therefore, I must hate passionately.

"And the highest, holiest, most intense, most exclusive, most totally committed type of love is romantic love, sexual love."

Not a criticism of your situation, but ... you don't have children, do you?

Allison:
""And the highest, holiest, most intense, most exclusive, most totally committed type of love is romantic love, sexual love."

Not a criticism of your situation, but ... you don't have children, do you?"

No. And I never intend to. Does that invalidate what I wrote? No, it doesn't. It's irrelevant. Ayn Rand never had any children. Nietzsche never had any children. Jesus never had any children. Muhammad had children. Karl Marx had children. Hitler never had any children. Stalin had children. The Pope doesn't have any children (though he tells everybody else to). It's irrelevant. Anyway...

I stand by every word I wrote.

And, by the way, I hate Political Correctness and the Religion of Peace:
http://www.classicalvalues.com/archives/2004_01.html#000738

Shep: "Other than the natural response to a direct assault on someone or something you love, hating another person is neither normal or healthy. Perhaps love can become unbalanced or even perverted, but abstract hate comes twisted right out of the box."

Abstract hate, perhaps, but Dean's examples are all pretty specific. I'd suggest that abstract hate (like hatred of all black people, for example) is actually a perversion of pure hatred, just as obsessive love is a perversion of true love.

John: "A quick thesaurus look-up: abhorrence, animosity, contempt, detestation, disgust, repugnance, repulsion, revulsion, scorn... "

Nope, I'd say all those things are less than hate. When you lose hate as an absolute then you lose the black in your shades of gray. If you place Stalin and Amin in the same emotional box you use for Michael Moore or Karl Rove then I think you've given up the ability to distinguish true evil from other things that are much less dangerous.

I have mostly stayed silent in order to let you all discuss my provocative thesis. Indeed, at times I think I should stop responding to comments entirely, and just let people say whatever they want to say.

Watching some of you discuss me has been probably my greatest pleasure. Vanity, thy name is Esmay. ;-) Yes, I do like to wrestle with difficult issues, common assumptions, and Big Questions. It's the whole reason this weblog exists, honestly. Otherwise, I'd be spending most of my time like a hermit, reading and perhaps scribbling in a notebook.

But, for the record? I do not ever--and I mean ever--take a position that I do not actually hold. Unless I make it clear that I am playing devil's advocate, anyway. Although I may sometimes realize I've said something stupid and need to back off (Me? Say something stupid? Perish the thought.) my point is, if I say something, I almost certainly mean it. If I am a provocateur, it is over an issue where I think complacency is inappropriate--not for the sheer joy of provocation.

But the always-thoughtful Rick DeMent has issued a challenge. Before I answer it, I will note that one of his wisest utterances to date is as follows:

99% of all internet arguments boil down to definitions and assumptions.

In fact, maybe we should declare that to be DeMent's Law.

The only exception I'd take is that I believe that 99% of all arguments might well be described in such a way. How we define the words we use, often, defines who we are.

Blah blah blah. So Rick challenges me as follows:

In fact that would be my challenge to Dean, if what he says is true, then he can demonstrate how hate can yield a positive result. If hate is truly a healthy thing then give us a scenario where your hatred of someone made a situation better.

Let me start by going back to the trusty dictionary. Using the American Heritage:

Hate: 1) To feel hostility or animosity toward. 2) To detest.

Using this definition (and I understand that we all have our personal definitions, but this is as objective as one may get), then I don't think hate is a "personal" thing at all. I do not need to know you to hate you--although perhaps if I get to know you I will lose my hatred, it may well be that getting to know you personally will merely make me hate you more.

Ara Rubyan says, "Hating someone is like drinking poison and then waiting for the other person to die." This is a good line. But I assert that it is simply wrong. Hatred is no more poisonous than joy, love, anger, or fear. It is when any of these emotions overcome your reason, when they become an obsession, when they become something you cannot let go of, that they become poisonous.

And yes, love can be poisonous--just watch what an over-nurturing mother can do to her children, or look at someone who kills herself as a result of unrequited love. Of course love can be poisonous.

Joy cannot be terrible? Watch someone take joy in the rape of a child.

Hate is no different. As with any emotion, if it becomes an obsession, something you cannot control, something that dominates your life, of course hatred can be destructive.

Indeed, I will grant that hatred, like anger, is an unsubtle emotion. Though love may be destructive, it certainly is easier to do damage with hatred, for it motivates us to do directly destructive things: to maim, to hurt, to kill, to destroy.

Thus the question really is: is destruction ever a good thing?

I urge you to read Gulag: A History or The Diary of Anne Frank, for I suspect that after reading them you will know the answer to that question: yes, destruction can be a very, very good thing indeed.

In its time, and in its place.

I am with Stephen: I hate Nazis, and their apologists. Hate Them. I hate Communists, and their apologists. Hate Them.

We can argue about how that hatred should be expressed, or what should be done about it. But is it unhealthy to hate such people? I think not.

In fact, I think it unhealthy not to hate them, and that failure to hate them is far more dangerous than hating them ever could be.

Failure to hate appropriately can lead us to excuse and overlook things that should never be excused or overlooked. Hating things properly has often given us the drive to address wrongs that badly need addressing. It can motivate us to a just war. It can motivate us to catch evil people and put them away forever. It can lead us to beat the living crap out of a bully who badly needs the living crap beat out of him. It can lead us to defend people who badly need defending.

And so I return again to my thesis:

Hate is an entirely normal, entirely healthy human emotion. When, like all other emotions, you avoid letting it become an obsession, avoid letting it dominate your life.

Hatred does not dominate my life. It does not fill my days and nights. It does not inform my every action. But I do hate certain things, and certain people, and I am utterly unashamed of that.

Although if some reasonable person thinks that one of my hatreds is misplaced, I would be happy to discuss that.

Oh, for the record? I have placed this conversation in our Best Discussions archive.

Dean:

Terrific. And, once again...

HAIL TO THE QUEEN OF ALL EVIL!!!! HAIL TO THE QUEEN OF ALL GOOD!!!! HAIL TO THE QUEEN OF ALL!!!!

I agree with not liking what they stand for, or even wanting to remove them from this earth to save more lives, but the hate thing is kinda strong don't you think!?

Like your Blog!!

Thanks!!

tracyv

I'll say it again: If you don't hate the Nazis who murdered Anne Frank, you must be some sort of Holocaust denier.

"Fear leads to Anger. Anger leads to Hatred. Hatred leads to Suffering."

Wrong. Disagree.
Fear _may_ lead to anger, or it may just lead to running away. The "fight or flight" response.
Anger does _not_ necessarily lead to hatred, or else all marriages would break up at the first argument, and all parents would kill or disown their children. I don't have children, as I said, but I _was_ a child, and my parents loved me -- and, boy, did they get angry with me a lot! I was spanked many times and I'm glad of it.
And, as Dean pointed out, hatred, war, and the resulting destruction of an Auschwitz or a Kolyma leads to _less_ suffering.

McGehee,

Sorry, spelling noted and I will make a note to get it correct in the future [g].

Dean said "Indeed, at times I think I should stop responding to comments entirely, and just let people say whatever they want to say."

Man, its not even funny about leaving us to ourselves :)

Dean: "Indeed, at times I think I should stop responding to comments entirely, and just let people say whatever they want to say."

I hope not! I need your _style_ even when I disagree with you! That's why I read your blog. And I agree with you totally here.
Oh, and I also hate Osama bin Laden and all of his followers. And I hate the doctrine that it's wrong to hate. Hatred of the bad is good. The only hatred that's not good is hatred of the good. Love the good and hate the bad, hate that which negates the good.

Dunno Steven. Seems like you have a constricted viewpoint.

Anger is born out of fear. Without fear you will find there is no base for the anger.

Anger not leading to hatred? I agree it does not necessarily lead to hatred. But hatred without anger? Don't think so. Like the path to the dark side, anger can be your first step toward hate.

As for hatred, war and destruction leading to less suffering: the end of the atrocity was the end of the suffering. Any other interpretation involving the pivotal role of hatred, war and destruction is an end-justifies-the-means argument. Good luck with that.

And I am not any sort of Holocaust denier. I have better things to do than examine my feelings toward dead people. (I assume they're dead. If not they should be. Right?)

Pity, understanding, fortitude. These will be the weapons of mass construction used to build a world where hate is the exception rather than an accepted norm.

I really like your arguments and your style, btw. Keep it up.

Brett Fife:
"I really like your arguments and your style, btw. Keep it up."

Thank you!

But I'm going to have to disagree with you...

"Anger is born out of fear. Without fear you will find there is no base for the anger."

Sometimes. More often, anger is born of frustration. Sometimes minor irritation. It is true that when I'm nervous, I'm more irritable. Sometimes it's from outrage at some injustice. Sometimes from loss, sorrow. Most of the time, in personal relationships, it's just the fact that people are so different that they have a hard time understanding each other. And some people are by temperament more easily perturbed than others. That's just the way we are.

"Anger not leading to hatred? I agree it does not necessarily lead to hatred. But hatred without anger? Don't think so. Like the path to the dark side, anger can be your first step toward hate."

Hatred necessarily involves anger, but so does love. As I said, husband or wives get angry with their spouses, parents with their children, friends with friends. You can't have a strong love relationship without occasional anger. With strangers or more casual friends or acquaintances you can be pleasant continually, but in more intimate relationships that's impossible. My brother frequently gets mad at me for my lazy and slovenly ways, but that's because he loves me. He'd be more tolerant if he were indifferent. Jealousy is inseparable from sexual love, and sometimes love turns to hate. I suppose that means that love is the path to the dark side. If so, I'm willing to take that path.

"As for hatred, war and destruction leading to less suffering: the end of the atrocity was the end of the suffering. Any other interpretation involving the pivotal role of hatred, war and destruction is an end-justifies-the-means argument. Good luck with that.

And I am not any sort of Holocaust denier. I have better things to do than examine my feelings toward dead people. (I assume they're dead. If not they should be. Right?)

Pity, understanding, fortitude. These will be the weapons of mass construction used to build a world where hate is the exception rather than an accepted norm."

I'm interested in learning from history to prevent it from being repeated by those who would have us forget it. I can't read about Auschwitz and its equivalents without feeling hatred toward its perpetrators. And that's not a weakness, that's strength. As I said, I'm proud of my hate, it's my sense of justice burning within me. We'll never win the War against terrorism and totalitarianism by forgiving the terrorists or trying to see things from their point of view, the "why do they hate us?" crap. We've been doing way too much of that. We need to start making _them_ think about why _we_ hate _them_. Let them fear our wrath. And, by the way, I hate Saudi Arabia. I hate any regime, any religion, that burns schoolgirls alive because they weren't wearing the "proper" Islamic clothing. I hate the Religion of Peace, and the more I'm told I'm not supposed to hate it, the more I hate it. I hate Political Correctness.

"Dunno Steven. Seems like you have a constricted viewpoint."

My viewpoint come from a lifetime of reading, reflection, introspection, experience, and observation. And, to be impolite, not from popular Hollywood movies preaching a pseudo-Oriental philosophy (the "Yoda" character). We, the West, need less of such philosophy and more intelligently-directed hate and true love.

To combine threads - John Kerry found that is was a time to hate wrinkles, thus a time to Botox.

I spent some time thinking on this one, Dean. My conclusion is that you are right, and that I disagree with you.

You make an important statement regarding the nature of emotion, in that even the ones we regard as preferable can become consuming, and thus destructive. I love my wife. I love her above all others, and cherish her to the point that I would willingly sacrifice myself for her. The same is true of my sons. I would have to say that, as far as a healthy level of love goes, I push the envelope when it comes to my family. When I love them to the point of coveteousness, when I am unwilling to share them with the world, the line is crossed, and I need serious therapy.

Hate is a God-given emotion, if you are of a nature to believe in anything being "God-given". If you are not, then hate is merely another function of primative survival, and as such can be neither wrong nor right. But that is another issue entirely.

If hate is a valid emotion, then it follows that hate should face the same constraints as love. There must be safe and healthy levels of hatred, and when hatred becomes an obsession, you need to find a nice leatherette couch and a trained professional.

So I agree with your list. If you can't hate these men, there is something wrong with you. There was never a list of men so worthy of hatred, and of whom it might be said that hatred is the proper response.

Having gotten that out of the way, here is where we part. I absolutely have the capacity to hate them, with enthusiasm, and some more than others. These men, as unpopular as the word may be today, are Evil. And you, beyond many, know that I put actions to my words when I talk about fighting Evil. I choose not to hate them.

I will fight them, and what they have caused. I will fight their causes and machines with all my strength, wherever I find them, and to the death if required. I do not trivialize what they have done by saying, "They are not worth the energy it takes to hate them." They are worthy of every ounce of strength I have, or can recruit from other sources. But I choose not to hate them.

Just as love has clouded my judgement on many occasions, causing me to make poor choices that were ultimately harmfull to those I love, hate can do the same. I will regard these men, and their machinations, as coldly and emotionlessly as possible. I will not regard them with men, but as objectives to be overcome.

Those who have upheld the position promoting hate as a valuable tool with endless uses have done so with fervor and unswerving faith.

I hate that. A healthy reminder that to agree to disagree takes practice.

"You can't have a strong love relationship without occasional anger." Um, you can't, I can. It takes time, practice, patience and most of all; fortitude.

Good points, Stephen, I am unable to refute your position (other than the point above). I didn't mean to critique how you assembled your point of view, only how it was stated. If you read the comments carefully you'll see that I did not start that "Yoda" bit. You made a pointed effort to be impolite. This supports what I was trying to say. Thank you.

We, the world, need more common ground and less divisive hate.

Brett:
That's where we will have to agree to disagree. I agree with Dean. I have no common ground with a bin Laden. I don't believe in the One World. I believe only in me and mine: myself, my property, my family, my friends, my loved ones, my town, my country, my culture (the West), my Gods and my Goddesses. These I love and I hate whoever tries to destroy them.

Great post and comments. My two cents follows:

I can't say that I have ever "hated" anyone or thing. The people on Dean's list committed actions and held viepoints that I consider abhorent, and agree that their punishment should be death (using imaginative methods based on the person in question) but don't "hate" them. Its more of performing a civic duty, the removal of a danger to society.

I don't "hate" rattlesnakes, but would kill one if found in my yard. I would not search the nearby woods to attempt to eliminate them. "Hate" requires raising the object being hated to my own level. I don't have to "hate" the members of Dean's list (plus numerous others) to believe they are better off being the guest of honor at their own funerals, and could coldly and dispassionately pull the trigger to help them along.

When "hate" rises to the level of obsession, it prevents clear thinking and could interfere with the removal/negation of the "hated".

Bottom line is, we are all different; if it works for you, then don't change. If you have to "hate" Bill Clinton (or George Bush) before you can vote against him, go ahead. Just don't let your hatred prevent you from seeing the rest of the world and what is happening in it.

They have a saying locally.

"Me against my brother.
The two of us against our cousin.
The three of us against our neighbor.
The four of us against the world."

It is a good indication of how easy hate is to pick up. It also shows how easily hate can be put aside, when convenient.
At least, it is in this particular culture. We in the western world seem to have a hard time picking up hatred, and even more difficulty putting it down.