Another thing to keep in mind is that hatred per se is an emotional state that generally negatively affects the hater without necessarily having any impact at all on the hatee.
Principled opposition, yes. Occasional anger, understandably. Contempt and aversion, sure.
But unless you’re actually locked in a physical struggle for your very life and limb at the hands of your enemy, I don’t see anything that genuine blood-boiling savage hatred will accomplish for you that a more rational and cool-headed “I reject your position and everything it stands for but I’ll do my best to achieve compassion and understanding for your disastrous failure to be a decent human being” won’t.
In the vast majority of real-life circumstances, you have no practical need for the aggressive impulses and adrenalin surge produced by the feeling of hatred, and they’re not good for your blood pressure.
I’m not sure it’s relevant to the general topic of the thread, but I think it’s only fair for me to acknowledge that I don’t have the slightest notion what this sentence means, and Google is no help.
Do these people actually hate, condemn, and despise children in the sense usually implied by “hatred” on grounds of morality, as the OP seems to intend it?
Or do people who say “I hate children” typically mean simply that they don’t enjoy being around children and don’t want anything to do with children personally?
I think this thread is desperately in need of some definition clarification. Various posters seem to be using “hate” as synonymous with “blame”, “disagree with”, “disapprove of”, or just “not like”, pretty much indiscriminately.
None of those require that you hate a group of people though. You hate each individually, and there just happens to be more than one of them, if that makes sense. Hating a group is wrong when you unfairly assume they all share certain characteristics. So if you hate all criminals, that’s cool. If you hate all black people based on the presumption that they are all criminals, not cool.
If you hate a vegetarian for being a vegetarian, you don’t hate vegetarians
Since when? Everyone is perfectly free to change their religion at any moment in time, and a lot of people do. People who never even question their parent’s religion are not people I tend to respect.
You can hate anyone you want to hate. Just don’t threaten, harass, discriminate, or murder them. AKA, your right to hate group x stops when your behavior starts to infringe on their rights. Lots of people “hate children” and “hate lawyers” but no one goes around shooting them so it’s perfectly ok.
There’s a lot wrong with hatred, and it is self-destructive, but you don’t have any need at all to “hate yourself” before you can hate others. That doesn’t follow logically, and it contradicts experience.
I wasn’t being logical in my post … or I would have said IF hatred is strictly biochemical THEN hatred begins within … it is the hater who carries the hate chemicals. We can test this logic by assigned a false condition on the assumption, then clearly our conclusion is false … the hated provides their part of the hatred.
What I posted was just spiritual mumbo-jumbo, we hate what we’re ignorant of, but in truth we hate ourselves for being ignorant. Perhaps we wouldn’t hate on all suicide bombers if we knew their life stories. I honestly believe we’d find some of them very compelling, perhaps we’d have different biochemistry going on.
It’s always wrong to hate people, we can only punish unacceptable behavior, never unacceptable belief or speech.
Hate is an emotion, a feeling. People cannot control how they feel. Therapists will tell you to feel what you feel, accept it, and then learn how to not let that emotion cause you to do bad things either to yourself or others. You can control your behavior but not your emotions.
Personally, I can’t imagine disliking anyone or anything to such an extent that I would actually call it “hatred.” Annoyed by, in disagreement with, afraid of, repulsed by, yes.
I think you’re looking through the wrong end of the telescope.
Forget classes of people. What are good reasons for hating an individual person?
Some bad reasons for hating a person:
-They like pierogis.
-They smell weird.
-They follow a religion that leads them to treat other people with respect.
-They generally mind their own business.
-They enjoy a musical genre you don’t enjoy.
-They fuck in a way that you find distasteful but that doesn’t actually hurt anyone.
Some reasonable reasons to hate someone.
-They like punching strangers.
-They smell of the blood of their victims.
-They follow a religion that leads them to justify hurting other people.
-They generally try to impose their will on others around them.
-They try to censor musical genres because they don’t enjoy them.
-They fuck in a way that hurts someone (rape, pedophilia), or they pass laws to prevent the kind of harmless fuckery that they find distasteful.
Trying to set up very broad categories (no hating people because of religion!) is the wrong approach. Hating someone because they’re Sufi is foolish; hating someone because they’re ardent and active practitioners of Identity Christianity is actually pretty reasonable.