Religious Hate

A comment I received this morning got me to thinking a little bit about religious hate (Thanks Betsy!) and that being the cause for wars.  Why do Christians, who are trying to do right, get blamed for everything wrong in the world?  Maybe I should say ‘true’ Christians.  A true Christian will hate certain things.  But that is not the cause for wars as this reader surmised.

What does a true Christian hate?  A true Christian hates sin, simply put.  What is sin?  The most simple place to start is the Ten Commandments.  Surely everyone is aware of the Ten Commandments?  You know…Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness, thou shalt not commit adultery…  Shall I go on?  Honor thy father and thy mother, thou shalt have no other gods before me.  Oops..I guess that last one is too offensive?  There are no other gods.  There is only one true, living God.

So again I ask, why are Christians blamed for the wrong in this world?  A true Christian doesn’t hate a person – we are told to love our enemies, in fact.  A true Christian hates the sin in this world.  Everyone commits sin – no one is perfect, except Jesus Christ himself.  A true Christian will ask forgiveness for a sin that he or she commits.  He will not live in that sin.  So why are we to blame for what’s wrong in this world?

A true Christian will hate another religion because it is teaching error.  To teach that error is also a sin – it is filled with lies.  But a Christian will not start a war based on that hate.  A Christian will try to teach the truth as laid out in God’s Word.  Wars are not started over this kind of hate.

The kind of hate that wars are started over is the kind that the Muslims displayed when they killed 3,000 people in my country.  It is this kind of religious hate that is taught to children growing up that wars are started over.  In the Islam religion, if one doesn’t believe as you do, they are infidels and deserve to be killed.  Remember – they are the ones calling for Jihad.