You can’t hate anyone because of their race. You can’t hate anyone because of their religion. Yet if someone is evil, you can hate them with a vengeance. Is hating evil people the last human prejudice?
(FYI I am not saying evil people shouldn’t be rehabilitated, or if that is not possible, locked away for good.)
Thank you in advance to all who reply 
From “The Witness”
My first response is – who says you can’t hate people because of their race or religion? You just can’t discriminate based on race or religion.
My second response is that it is unclear to me that evil people constitute a class. Can you define ‘evil people’ and give the parameters of the class of evil people, please.
By “evil people” I mean someone who has done something that most people would consider to be very wrong. These people are typically, though not always, in prison.
If you are asking if you are allowed to hate those people, the answer is yes, you are. Bear in mind that you might be hating people who have a mental disease, or were wrongly convicted, or have been truly rehabilited. But nothing says you cannot hate them.
In my personal experience, hate is a pretty usless emotion when applied to a group of people, and ends to have harmful effects on the hater. YMMV.
In my personal life, I don’t even feel hatred for “my worst enemy” – the person who is causing me the most anguish. In some ways, I still love her and that’s one of the reasons she can cause so much pain.
There are public figures – five or six of them – that I resent and intensely dislike. I still would have trouble saying that I “hate” them.
If I hated someone, wouldn’t I enjoy seeing her or him in pain? Is that a good way of testing hatred?
It’s not prejudice, because you are not prejudging them. The problem isn’t hatred of evil people; it’s identifying them.
I’d say there are at least as many in positions of wealth and power.
What if people are only half bad? Or quarter bad? Are they the half breeds or quadroons of evil? Is okay to hate them on a part-time basis?
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Of course it’s OK to hate evil people, and to actively seek to stop them, even if their destruction is the result.
It’s not OK to become consumed by that hatred, and to seek to destroy them when other ways of stopping them are readily available.
Something I’m tempted to start up in another thread (GD or the Pit, depending on how much I cut loose) is a counter to the lauding of the Amish for their forgiving response to the murderer, and especially the lauding of their continued pacifism.
IF it were possible for the adult women or the older boys in that school to have overpowered the gunman, using non-lethal violence, and they did not do so because of an adherence to their pacifist faith, then they were tragically mistaken, and that tenet of their faith is not to be lauded but roundly condemned.
Btw, I am on the other hand, totally filled with admiration as to how they have reached out compassionately to the killer’s family.
What about John Couey. the guy who raped and murdered a little girl named Jessica Lunsford down in Florida? What a waste of protoplasm. I believe I could lock that sucker in a room, hand the girl’s father one of those nice aluminum baseball bats that don’t break or anything, and open the door for him, whistling merrily as I did so. I dunno if I hate Couey, but I’m SUPREMELY indifferent to any suffering he may experience prior to shuffling off this mortal coil.
But these are two very different things.
Again, pacifism and non-hatred are two different things. It’s possible to try to thwart someone, even by killing them if necessary, without hating them.
For that matter, it’s possible to rob, lie, cheat, rape, torture and murder someone without hating them. It’s also possible to do absolutely nothing to someone and hate them. Hate is neither good nor bad IMHO.
Oh, and far as the OP is concerned, there’s plenty of accepted prejudices still around, even if you restrict yourself to America ( much less “human prejudice” ). You’ll get little condemnation for hating atheists; hating the poor is nearly a religion; hatred of gays is still dominant; it’s OK to hate the members of minor religions in general, etc. America is less prejudiced than it was, but it’s still quite bigoted. It looks better because it was so bad before.
Good Lord, you actually believe that? Haven’t you been paying attention?
Sailboat
Leaving aside the question of hatred “corroding the soul,” I’d say that, from a strictly practical standpoint, hatred corrodes good judgment, self control, and the ability to limit one’s response to what is appropriate for one’s own functioning.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it does physiological damage over the long term, either.
Sailboat
I can’t believe I’m saying this.
What Would Jesus Do?
And it is not the last. We’ll always hate ugly people more than anything else.
Well, I think whether or not you hate someone often has to do with religion. Christians, as far as I know, aren’t really supposed to have hatred in their hearts for anyone—which is different from disliking (or being unfond of) them.
Now, I wouldn’t say that hating evil people is predjudice necessarily, because generally, unlike race or sexual preference or something along that vein, whether or not someone is good or evil is determined by their freely-willed choices. Meaning, we say that a person is evil because they chose to do evil deeds. So, the judgement isn’t necessarily “prejudice,” because it’s based on the merit that person chose to establish for themselves.
On a personal level, I would say that harboring hate for “evil” individuals is general human failing. It’s almost as if when someone does something extraordinarily heinous, they become a convenient whipping boy for us—taking the focus off of our own faults.
“Well, I know I shouldn’t have cheated on my wife, or stolen from work, but at least I didn’t kill people—I’m not evil.”
I’m not saying that we should find someone’s evil deeds contemptable or that we should seek due course of justice, but harboring hate inside just kind of rots the soul a little bit, no?
Awesome.
Liberal? Is that you?
Hatred also gives people the drive to fight back against tyrants long after fully rational people would give up. It gives people the drive to spend years fighting against an evil group, or a disease, or an evil custom, or any number of things.
I’d call hatred a useful human emotion, poorly implemented. We should sue the designer, if there was one.
Oh, I’m certain it does; any emotional stress will do that if it lasts long enough.