A Culture of Hate

This post is going to be inflammatory. It shouldn’t read that way, but it will. I am not coming from a place of being inflamed, just tired.

I have really grown exhausted with this culture of hate that we live in. What hate? Take a look out of your kitchen window. Hate rides on the air, looks for cracks and seeps into our homes. Hate travels into our eyes and ears, saturating our minds and hearts. You may say, “Well I don’t hate anyone!” I’m sorry, you do. If you did not hate, your life would be an unmanageable mess. Some people hate injustice, some hate curse words, some hate PBS. Hate is the excuse we use to eliminate things from our lives. Sometimes the excuses are valid. Most often, they are not.

Western culture has fought hard to eliminate the need for God to exist. In many ways it has succeeded. We hold ourselves to a basic moral code at best. Kind of like, don’t murder (unless you HAVE to), and uh, well, don’t murder. One could get up in arms and say, “I believe that everyone should be treated kindly!” No, you don’t. Sorry, I don’t either. Let me illustrate:

I believe in the Creator. I believe life begins at conception and that abortion is MURDER. I think evolution is ludicrous, bunk science, with natural selection being the only part that kind of makes sense. I think liberals are misguided and are leading us into communism, which in turn leads to dictatorship. I think public schools should be called government schools. I believe there is an active, enforced, program of indoctrination going on in universities.

Are you angry yet? If you presented the flip side to me. I would at the very least be highly irritated. I may even want you treated unkindly. Not by me, of course. And I would only want you punished enough to “show you the light”. Thus begins the process of me “hating” you and eliminating you from my life.

If you hate, dislike, are uncomfortable, or disagree with something, that makes it okay, easy, necessary to destroy eliminate or ban. Hating God makes it okay to brand Christians as morons. Hating atheists makes it okay for them to burn in hell. Hating people makes it okay to kill them, their culture, their belief system. Hating the unborn child makes it okay to remove it. Hating abortion makes it okay for a woman to die during one, or in the least for it sterilize her. Hating the oil companies makes it okay to kill 9 million jobs. Hating the President makes it okay for all of the Solyndra employees to go down in flames. Hating big agriculture makes it okay to shut off their irrigation water and starve people around the world. Hating independent farmers makes it okay for the Health Department to descend on a dinner party and forcefully throw all of the food away. Hating vaccines makes it okay for vaccinated children to get autism. Hating anti-vaccine parents makes it okay for children to die of whooping cough. Hating the boy who is dressed like a typical teenage punk makes it okay to shoot him.

Well, THEY should know better. Be better informed. Be more intelligent. Be more resourceful. Be less stupid. Be like ME.

The arrogance.

I know it is easy to look in the mirror and think of all the beautiful things I THINK I have done for mankind. But I haven’t. I do more harm than good. Daily. I can turn on a news channel that will back up my views. I can get the spin on any story and go spout “my” opinion to my friends and neighbors. I can even make it sound really great. I appear so informed. But, I am so naive. So are you. We are chasing the wind. We have too much knowledge and very little wisdom. (Maybe we should quit hating our elders and locking them up in a closet somewhere.)

The basic biblical concept of loving your neighbor as yourself is lost on today’s society. Why? Because we have expunged anything related to God from our lives. If we hadn’t we would remember that ALL have fallen short. ALL of us are in the same boat. We would KNOW that whoever is the least is the greatest. Jesus, Others, You. In that order. That is where true JOY comes from. We would know that hating someone in your heart is the same as murdering them.

Here we are. We are here.

Unless hate is eliminated we will come to the same conclusion. I am sorry to report that hatred will not disappear. This is a broken world. Only One will fix it. Until then, we hate. Even if we raised our children to never judge (hate) a person for the color of their skin, hatred would just take another form. How virus like! Even if we raised our children not to hate others because of their beliefs, hatred would morph itself around another cause. Hate can be so subtle and prettily packaged. (I’d rather go naked than wear fur, you fur wearing troglodyte!) (Choosy moms choose Jif!)

Sigh. It’s hard. I think that’s why the Bible says “Faith, hope, love…but the greatest of these is love.” Love is much harder, but I am willing to try. Are you?