Teach Your Children That It's Okay To Hate

I mean that.  Teach them that it is perfectly acceptable and even healthy to feel hatred.

It is a GOOD thing to hate.

Just like it is a GOOD thing to feel sadness, fear, resentment, anger, loneliness, regret, guilt, hate, etc… 

When we teach our children to “hate” these feelings, to fear them and reject them and deny them and suppress them – we are teaching our children a lie.  We are teaching them that they should always be happy, always be pleasant, always like other people, always be pleased with life and its outcomes.

Really?  We should be happy with death, loss, hunger, abuse, disease, failure and rejection?

We shouldn’t hate anything?  Really?

Any Christians out there?

 - Proverbs 6:16 tells us that the Lord hates some things.

 - Revelations 2:6 tells us Jesus hated as well.

Hate and love are the strongest emotions possible.  They are not opposites.  The opposite of love is apathy.  The opposite of hate is also apathy.

Teaching kids to ignore their strongest “negative” emotions also inevitably limits their “positive” emotions.

If you get rid of the strongest hate, you also get rid of the strongest love.   

Why do Christians believe that Christ’s love is the ultimate love?  Why is it perfect?

Because he felt all our pain, all our sufferings, all of our shortcomings, all of our hatred.  He felt all those things - completely understands us, and he has the most perfect love and caring and concern for our eternal well-being.

Hate isn’t bad.  Doing hateful things is bad.  

You may be tempted to say - "but hate can only lead to bad things - love leads to all good things."

Really?  How many terrible things have been done in the name of "love" or in the pursuit of "happiness."

Telling kids not to hate is like telling Elsa in the movie Frozen to “conceal don’t feel.”

Thoughts and emotions are neither good nor bad – they just are.  Thoughts and emotions happen whether we want them to or not.  The question is what we DO with them.  They are all useful and appropriate at times.

Happiness/cheeriness can be a very bad thing.  At a funeral, in the Emergency room, when admitting your child to the psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt - being happy and cheery and full of bubbly hope and peter pan advice like “think a happy thought” - is not "good" in these situations.  It is not appropriate, it is not helpful, it is bad.

Why do you think the happiest people usually seem to be the people who have suffered the most?  Why do the most inspirational people, the ones who really touch us – usually have horrific life histories of pain and suffering and hate.  Those emotions taught them how to feel true love and appreciation and caring.  They learned how to accept the fact that they feel hatred and anger, and how to use that emotion to live a happy life, according to their beliefs and values.

If we teach our children to fear emotion, to fear anger and hatred and deny that those feelings ever existed - we are setting them up to explode.  The hate and anger are there.  Everyone feels them.  We can either admit it and accept it, or conceal it, fear it, and then await the explosion of the ticking time bomb.

Don't teach kids to fear hatred.  Teach them what to do when they feel it; what it means, and why it's good. 

Teach your kids that it's okay to hate - it's the only way they'll ever learn to love.

Forgiveness is Easy: We've Been Doing it Our Entire Lives

“I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a man’s bad actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.  For a long time I used to think this a silly straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life - namely myself.  However much I might dislike my own cowardice, or conceit, or greed, I went on loving myself.  There had never been the slightest difficulty about it.” - C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity, p 177)
  

We all love ourselves.  We love our family, our school, our city, our country, our culture.  We love our political party, our opinions, our sense of humor, our wit.  We love our quirks, our unique view of the world, and we are willing to forgive our little imperfections because "we're inherently good people who occasionally make mistakes."

We forgive our own rudeness (because somebody had to say it)
We don't mind our own stereotypes (the stereotype wouldn't exist if it weren't true, right?)
We forgive our own dishonesty (it was an innocent lie, and no one got hurt)
We don't mind our own greed (at least we want it for the right reasons?)

The Golden Rule was never so applicable.  Instead of just "doing," how about we THINK of others as we think of ourselves?

We don't have to assume all people think the same way we do about all topics.  But might we assume that the reason for their view is just as valid as ours?

Can't we assume that people who make mistakes are just as good as us, they simply make different mistakes?

It reminds me of the phrase: "God, Help me to love those who sin differently than I."

We judge people.  We have to in order to live and get anything done.  But we don't have to be mean, or assign blame or evil intent to every action we think is bad.  We recognize bad behavior, we try to protect ourselves and others from being victims.  But we don't have to demonize the person making mistakes.  We can see them as they are - because they are just like us.