God Hates??? LAAF

According to picketers, God hates a lot of people.  I won't go into great detail but here is an article at Gizmodo that defines a recent incident.  I also stumbled upon another website that details a picketing schedule and their reasons for such things but will not post a link or name here.  Reading it made me sad, and I'd rather not pass it on for people not ready for it.

Please forgive me for any misconceptions and feel free to correct me on any wrong or misleading information.  My knowledge of God is derived from films, occasional attendances to Jehovah Witness observances of Nisan 14, and college level theology and literature courses.  I grew up as a Jōdo Shinshū Buddhist, which is essentially a sect of Mahayana Buddhism.  Currently I subscribe to the idea of transcendentalists and deists.  So onward to my argument.

If you hate something then say that you hate it.  Recognize your responsibility and accountability to these words.  Please don’t place your words or beliefs in the voice an omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient being that could very well end the Kingdom of Man on a Monday and create a new order by Sunday.  I doubt that God, or any other such being, requires our assistance on hating.

So if we take God out of the hateful equation the question then becomes why do we hate?

I hate mayonnaise.  There I said it.  There are times when I hate myself as well.  Some will say that hate will only degrade your sense of being.  This can be true, especially when only the surface of the hate is focused upon.  Misguided and unattended hate can be dangerous as it festers in one’s nether regions, manifesting destructive tendencies.

But hate that is accepted and reflected upon can be cathartic, and stops being hate all together.

Mayonnaise gives me heartburn and leaves my mouth with a strange tingly flavor.  It also constricts my breathing a bit.  So my hate for the mayonnaise is a physical response that is not one of my desired effects from food.

On the other hand I beat myself up with hate because I’m not living up to the way in which I envision myself.  It becomes like an abusive relationship with myself where I make the wrong choices and then decide to get upset about wrong choices.  Basically the truth behind it is that I care about myself, just not in the right way sometimes.

If I focus on this hate it’ll just get depressing and the present and future will be flooded by a past that doesn’t exist.

So the choice becomes whether to hate my life or strive for the life I want.

In the case of hating others it may get a little more complicated.  It could be because you care, or fear, or don’t understand, or find their actions to be abhorrent.

But how will you ever find the reason if you pretend that it’s someone else with the hate?  You may discover that there wasn’t really any hate there to begin with.

I personally don’t believe hate to be bad.  It’s an misguided emotional response.  The actions we take for any such response, including love, can be destructive.  

I find apathy to be much worse, especially in a world where we have no choice but to live with one another.

Since we live in such a world where human and environmental interactions are inevitable I propose the use of following acronym for dealing with hate or avoiding it all together:

LAAF

Love
Appreciate
Accept
Forgive

Actually there was a P word in there too but I can’t remember it.  So the acronym would have been FLAAP.  Maybe you just gotta find your own P.  Or, better yet, find your acronym for what you want to believe in and live for.

Whatever you decide and act upon, own it.

These people did.