All posts tagged: Hate

And They Will Know We Are Christians By Our Hate

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By Dr. Michael L. Brown Did you ever hear the song that begins with the words, “We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord”? The lyrics are very simple, with the repeated refrain, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, Yeah they’ll know we are Christians by our love.” Today, we might want to change that refrain to “they’ll know we are Christians by our hate, by our hate.” We have become terribly disfigured in recent years, in many ways, the opposite of God’s intent. How on earth did this happen? If you don’t believe me, visit some of our personal, Bible-affirming, Jesus-believing, social media pages, where we savage each other and attack each other and spread hearsay and even lies about one another with reckless abandon. They are hate-filled pages, pages filled with venom and poison, yet pages that ultimately reflect what is in our own hearts. I ask again: how on earth did this happen? To give one recent, case in point, when my …

Mad Hater

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Remember the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland? He was intense and temperamental, disturbed and dramatic. He may have been a fictional character yet he and his friend, the March Hare, were both quite insane. Imagine if we had people that eccentric, that energetic, that intense, and that disturbed running around in today’s fictional-sounding reality? Wait. We do. The Mad Haters. The Mad Haters is a great name for a punk rock band or even maybe a sports team. The very name invokes images of something you don’t want to mess with. They could even be a gang of youthful thugs fighting turf wars against their counterparts, the Rock Bottoms, or the Laughing Fools. If only they were fictional characters in some drug-induced fantasy story. But alas, they are all too real. A mad hater is someone who hates without reason, unless that reason is that you disagree with their politics. Or that you don’t live on the same street. Or that you like your eggs fried and not poached. Which end of the egg …

Credit: Michael J. Moeller/Flickr/Creative Commons

But I Don’t Like You

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So who do you not like? You could answer with a name. I could do the same in my life. If we want to use the word ‘fault’ it probably is their fault, and maybe they started it, that’s even better. Have you noticed how easy it is to dislike, and maybe hate people these days? Internet media gives us pictures and videos of people who need correction, and it’s always their fault, and they started it. We can correct the whole world, and feel good about ourselves. There is a popular video game called “Hatred” where we can act this out in virtual reality, and not liking other people is the basic plot of most movies these days. We can pay money in a theatre to watch the ballet of pay-back. In October of 2018, some protesters with different ideas collided in the same space. It’s not hard to see the dislike: If you watch the video, you will soon start to dislike someone, and it really is their fault, and you didn’t start …

Why do some Christians love to hate? Photo: Bart/Flickr/Creative Commons

Christians Who Hate

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Wikipedia has a list of “List of terrorist incidents, January–June 2016” and it is a long list for just six months, with everything from mob violence to airport bombings. Human beings are violent and unhappy. When I check the news, someone else has died in some terrorist attack, somewhere in the world. I hope we never get immune to the fact that most killers, in these news stories, hate and kill in the name of God. The good news for Christians is that most religious violence has come from other religions; until now. So can Christians hate? Can we hate people, and not just bad things? Would the death of anyone make your life better? I know that the mean and miserable people in my life are growing older; but every time one of them dies, my life does not get better. There is no improvement down that road. My happiness is tied to God, not to them. So is there any possibility of Christian-inspired violence in the world? Yes. I have never met someone …

Praying during Ukraine revolution in 2014 Photo: Steve Evans/Flickr/Creative Commons

Talking to your imaginary friend; praying to God

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Do you remember when people were courteous? That was before the Internet. Now we have blogs and mean trolls who express hatred that could get them arrested, or assaulted, in a public place. Hatred of Christians is one popular theme. If you wait long enough, everyone gets hated by someone on the Internet, and I don’t think we are special victims. But the experience is painful for a Christian. “Yesterday lunchtime I walked past a street preacher who was yelling through a bullhorn that there can be no morality without an imaginary friend. I felt it to be my moral responsibility to tell him that not only was he wrong, but that he is also a complete idiot.” Other comments are like: Have you had a conversation with your invisible friend lately? How is Jesus different from a pink unicorn? Children have imaginary friends, the rest of us have grown up. If one person believes in something invisible, that is insane; if many people believe together, it’s religion. There is more, and worse, but I …