This would surely be the difference between how you evaluates yourself and how other people evaluate you. If you believe that your actions are justified in your own moral framework, then you would not judge the actions to be evil. Other people who don’t share your viewpoint would both condemn your actions as evil and probably wouldn’t care what your supposed justification was.
As I was typing that last sentence, another flavor of the OP’s question. If we buy the teaching to hate the sin and not the sinner, doesn’t that contradict “Evil is as evil does?” That is, is calling a person evil the same as hating them in addition to hating their evil acts?
I don’t know about the Catholic church, but many Protestants are taught that good works are not sufficient for getting into heaven. You must also love the Lord with all of your heart.
In the particular church I was grew up in, I was taught that not meeting this second condition was enough to get you a seat in hell–the same punishment that an “evil-doer” gets.
I was a teenager when I realized I was destined for hell. Not because I didn’t believe in God, since I did have a vague notion that there was a giant eye staring down at me at all times. But because I couldn’t make myself feel love for the giant eye and I knew I never would. All I could feel were negative feelings. Once I realized that it’s stupid to punish someone over a feeling (or lack thereof), I stopped believing all together.
I would seek counseling, but it wouldn’t have anything to do about fear over my soul or fear that I might act on those feelings, but rather out of concern that my thoughts+feeings indicate that I’m unhappy…that something is not well about my life and/or mental health.
Sometimes I catch myself feeling irritated by someone for no apparent reason. So often times I try to step back and figure out what’s going on. Is this person triggering feelings of insecurity or inadequency? Do they remind me of someone in my past? Do our personalities just clash? Or are they just an annoying individual? There’s always a reason for one’s thoughts and feelings. I agree that negative thoughts/feelings should alert someone that something is amiss. I just don’t think it’s reasonable to necessarily blame oneself first. If you’re surrounded by hate-inducing people, then the best thing to do would be to get out of that situation. Not sit there and try to pray the hate away.
Depends what is meant by “love”. I would say generally when talking about loving God and loving your neighbor, it’s not an emotion or feeling. It’s wanting for them what God wants for them. You don’t even have to like the person very much!
You may also have an emotional love for God out of gratefulness and because you know He wants good for you, or because you are happy to know Him.
Want is still an emotion. If a person feels completely neutral about their neighbors, and helps them out only because they want to be seen as the kind of person who helps other, they aren’t being a good Christian, right?
I totally agree that love is both an emotion and an action. But if loving action is all that is needed to get into heaven, then a lot of non-Christians are eligible for heaven. I was taught that this isn’t true. A lot of Christians do not believe this is true.
When you get into hard core Calvinism, things get pretty bleak.
Their position is that nobody can get into Heaven by their own volition. There’s nothing you can do that will make God admit you to Heaven. You could live what for a human being would be a perfect life and God would still reject you because God is so perfect that the best human who’s ever lived is still worthless in comparison to God.
So how does anybody get into Heaven? God decides to let some people in even though they don’t deserve to be let in. He gives those people grace (which they don’t deserve because they’re still worthless scum) and that grace lets them get into Heaven. And there’s nothing you can do to compel God to give you that needed grace.
There is, as I understand it, two schools of thought on the inevitability of grace. One is that humans do have one choice they can make: they can reject the grace that’s being offered to them and be damned of their own volition. The other side says that this isn’t possible: God is so overwhelming that you will receive his grace is he chooses to lay it on you. You have no power over God; not even the power to reject him. If you think you’ve rejected God it’s only because he chose to have you reject him.
And because God exists outside of time and is omniscient, he already knew at the moment of the creation of the universe who he would choose to save and who he would reject. We’re just playing out the plans God made for us back at the creation. Whether you’re saved or damned was decided long before you were born and can’t be changed.
Roald Dahl has an oft-quoted page in The Witches which touches on the evil-thoughts-look-ugly thing here, which I’ve always thought was a terrible thing to teach children, but there you go.
