I mean no one can hate like a Christian can. Children should not be told they are broken, sinful and doomed to eternal torture if they don’t accept Jesus …
No one can hate like a Christian can? That's a...nasty and ignorant point of view. It hasn't been Christian theocracies that have killed nearly 100 million people within the last 100 years or so but
atheistic, communist regimes. Stalin, Chairman Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Jong-il - all of these men were atheists and together they killed more people
by a huge margin than any so-called "Christian" political regime.
Anyway, it is in the nature of being human for humans to hate. Christian or not,
human beings hate all sorts of things. Some of those things they ought to hate: rape, murder, genocide, infanticide, cowardice, perversion, cruelty, betrayal, etc. Other things, people can hate without moral violation: spiders, rap music, the color orange, micro-fiber clothing, loud motorcycles, pot smoke, etc. Hate, then, is not across-the-board an objectionable thing.
So, what, then does the Christian hate? Does the Christian hate people? No. Do they hate dark skin, or slanted eyes? No. Do they hate tall people, or hairy ones? No. Do they hate ethnicity or dialects? No. The Christian hates what God hates. And what does He hate? Sin.
Why does God hate sin? Because it destroys; because it cuts people off from living in the fulfillment of the purpose for which God made them; because sin hardens, and blinds, and deafens people, confusing them, and binding them in darkness and delusion.
God is perfect. He doesn't
need you or I to hate sin. If no one on Earth hated sin, God would not be diminished one iota. And if we all obeyed God's Moral Law, God would not be improved in the slightest, either. He exists in perfection and cannot be lessened or improved by anything, as a result. He commands us to hate sin, then, solely
for our sake, not His. His Moral Law is intended to protect us from the corruption and death our sin always produces. How does God do wrong hating what will destroy us and urging us to do the same?
But human beings love what God hates; they love sin. And they love it so much, so persistently, that they are cut off from God, who is perfectly holy and just, by their practice of sin. God could just leave us all to stew in our own wickedness and die but because He loves us, He made a way through Jesus to free us from the penalty and power of Sin. How strange it is to me, then, to hear what is actually love on God's part characterized by you merely as indiscriminate hate.
Christians really twist the meaning of the word "love." Christians will say that it is loving to shun someone who leaves the faith, because that might push them to come back. In the case of conversion therapy, Christians will literally call torture "love."
Who do you know that has undergone "conversion therapy"? No one, I'll bet. In the last twenty years, who has suffered under the torture of such "therapy"? As far as I'm aware, "conversion therapy" of the sort of which you seem to be thinking just doesn't go on. It's a sort of "boogey man" thing, raised up in an effort to vilify Christians, employing the same broad brush thinking of which the racist is guilty when she asserts that all black people are the same, or that all black people ought to share in the guilt of the evil deeds of some black people. If it's wrong to speak in this overly-generalized way about black folk, why isn't it wrong to do so about Christians and their faith?
Why does your definition of "love" get to be the standard to which Christians ought to conform their own definition of "love"? Who says your definition is better than theirs? If there is no God, on what basis do you say, "Your 'love' is faulty and hateful. You should love in the way I think you should love." Without God, all you've got are humans telling each other how they should behave. But what gives one human the right to tell another what to do? No human has innate superiority over any other; no human possesses a special, intrinsic authority to dictate to other humans their morality. Without God, all you've got is human
preference.
