Hate hurts everybody. To hate someone is to diminish yourself as well as the person you hate. Since every human is created in the image of God, to hate someone is to diminish God and to distort the reality of the universe. Hate is powerful. Hate is destructive. You will always gain by getting rid of hate.
Robert Browning wrote a poem called “Soliloquy of a Spanish Cloister” in which one of the monks looks out of his window and sees a brother monk whom he hates. The poem is awesome as it begins:
Gr-r-r — there go, my heart’s abhorrence!
Water your damned flower-pots, do!
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
God’s blood, would not mine kill you!
What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming?
Oh, that rose has prior claims —
Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?
Hell dry you up with its flames!
No amount of protection from the outside world and confined controlled religious environment can protect anyone from the destructive power of hate within!
What do you hate? Yourself, someone who has hurt you, your parents, your partner, your boss, your special personal vision of God? Hate is just as inclusive as love. Hate can break out in any human situation that has lost control. Hate consumes a lot of energy.
Can you spare that much energy?
When logic fails
Four great words can bring hate under control and reverse the fatal course of hateful thinking: Logical, Objective, Realistic, and Practical. These four words express the effective use of your brain to be in control of your own thinking and life and to resist allowing negative emotions and misinformation to rule your life.
Logic fails whenever abusive misinformed religion convinces you that some people deserve to be hated and rejected as an abomination to God! This happens all the time regarding GLBT people and the most devastating results of self-hate is the self-destructive thinking and actions of GLBT people themselves. Many multitudes of us live just one step from suicide!
My years of experience in the gay world at every level has taught me clearly that nobody hates and hurts GLBT people nearly as much as we hate, hurt and destroy ourselves! I experience the self-destructive forces in myself every day. I am not immune to being illogical, and neither are you.
Faith-based hate
To believe even some of the lies and distortions of the facts that the fundamentalist homophobic “ex-gay” religious establishment dumps on you is deadly! None of the hate-based religious industry is based on logical, objective, realistic, practical thinking! Hate against and within GLBT people is based solidly on misinformation and ignorance. Run! Do not walk! To the nearest exit and escape from the self-hate that you have been taught by illogical, unrealistic, impractical religion!
Avoid abusive churches like the plague, because they are the plague!
People of hate write to me every day to tell me I am going to hell for giving hope and encouragement to GLBT people. I am constantly amazed at the obscene language and graphic descriptions of “perverted” sex that some of my hate mail contains. The enemies of the truth about sexual orientation are just as creative in their destructive hate as were the Nazi, Fascist, KKK, and biblical tyrants who hated and destroyed multitudes of innocent people simply because they were “different.”
Religion in today’s world is the chief sponsor of terrorism and the primary source of racial, ethnic and culturally based hate.
What can you do?
What can you do to make a difference in this hostile, hate-based world? You can begin by accepting and loving yourself! You can take the time and make the effort to learn the facts from reliable sources like those listed and cited in my web site and book.
You can make a personal commitment to logical, objective, realistic, practical thinking. Remember the slogan: “High truth for revenue always arouses suspicion!” Resist listening to and even partially accepting the message of mass media evangelists and religious personalities. Truth compromised for the sake of making money is no longer truth!
Political, religious and social extremists over simplify the issues and generate hate based enthusiasm for their own financial benefit and influence. Don’t listen! Turn off the hypocrites. Walk away. Look the other way. You donÌt have to give any attention to the craziness all around you. You have been liberated by the Spirit of Jesus. Now enjoy your freedom!
The author of Invitation To Freedom and Steps to Recovery from Bible Abuse, Rev. Rembert S. Truluck served in Metropolitan Community Churches in Atlanta, San Francisco and Nashville from 1988 to 1996. He earned a doctorate in sacred theology from Furman University, serving from 1953 to 1973 as a Southern Baptist preacher. He resigned as a professor at Baptist College at Charleston (now Charleston Southern University) and became an MCC pastor after being outed to the college’s board of trustees.