A serious question for Christians and Non-Christians: How Can Love Hate?

sabastious

1 John 4:2 - Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.

What does the statement "God is love" mean? Well quite simply that God = Love. Love is synonymous with God.

So you would be linguistically correct when you say "I God my wife" or "I God You". Love, according the Bible is a FORCE that humans TAP INTO in order to use. We CANNOT love on our own, according to the Bible.

Here is the question and I'll start with another scripture:

Psalms 11:5 - The LORD examines the righteous, but the wicked and those who love violence his soul hates.

If God = Love than how can Love be capable of hate? Hate is the antonym of Love.

You are free to answer as you like, but keep in mind that I ignore blatantly thoughtless answers such as "we, as humans can't understand Godly concepts such as these."

DISCUSS!

-Sab

Mad Sweeney

Simple answer. It can't.

How does one reconcile the scripture in 1John and the Psalm?

Again, a simple answer: The OT god of the Jews isn't the NT God of the Christians. They're two different beings who are in fact, opposed.

sabastious

Holy crap the word processor freaked out on me, just got it all fixed.

DISCUSS!

PSacramento

God is love, that is the message of the NT and the message of the word of God, Jesus, it overrides everythign else that had been said till that time.

It wasn'yt that the OT writers were wrong, they use the wording they though was right for their times, toi get through to their people.

Jesus had no such problem, he was the WORD of God and those that he spoke to, like Paul and John, two disciples that advocate love above all else, had no problem in writing down what The Word of God told them to or said to them.

It wasn't that the OT and NT God were different, it was that the message in the NT is the correct one for the NEW Covenant.

LittleSister

God we are lead to believe is the personification of love, but is still capable of hate. So is it really possible to be love and feel hate at the same time?

YES

Hate does not equal evil in fact it could be argued that hate is actually a facet of love. For example someone can be motivated by love to acts of hate e.g. the killing of a love rival or even war to defend the country they love.

Perhaps in truth we need to look again at what we understand and mean by the term love. It is I think more complex than we realise full of extremes of emotion both good and bad.

sabastious

@PSac

Very odd reasoning here. So the scripture in Psalms is not different but simply outdated? If this is true it brings up a slew of other questions. You depiction of "God's ultimate plan" is chock full of holes from where I am standing.

-Sab

sabastious

"God we are lead to believe is the personification of love, but is still capable of hate."

This is an interesting argument here. You are saying that when the Bible says God is Love that is actually just using the term as a metaphor and that God isn't ACTUALLY love but just the personification of love. Then, logically, he would be capable of hate.

BTW love never facilitates hate, it would only appear so at times. Just because someone is crazy and thinks they are "hating out of love" doesn't attest to love being connected with hate.

Love is similar to hate, yes as far as an emotion, but logically, hate cannot become from love and love cannot become from hate.

Love can TURN INTO hate, and vise versa.

-Sab

dgp

Simple answer. It can't.

MadSweeney got it right.

LittleSister

As the question was levelled at Christians and Non-Christians you must allow for different interpretations of love and not rely completely on scriptural reasoning.

It’s not a pop quiz with only one right answer and gold star for teachers pet. My pagan leanings tell me that hate can be part of love and that all emotions both good and bad stem from the supreme emotion of love either by a lack or excess. For example white light is similar to love being made up of a wide spectrum of different colours as love is made from a wide spectrum of emotions.

There seems to be a lot of JW thinking still here, let yourself and your minds be free and open.

sabastious

The only wrong answer to any philisophical question is a logically fallacious answer.

A serious question for Christians and Non-Christians: How Can Love Hate?

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