Redefining hate: from diabolical anti-love to any criticism of the fragile self

Jul 14, 2017 by Jill

by Gavin Ashenden, from Archbishop Cranmer:

During the General Synod debate on homosexuality I took to twitter. It’s like sitting up in the gods of a theatre. You are with the rowdy crowd. Shakespeare’s groundlings elevated to the grandstand of the internet. I chose my 140 characters with care. I tried the ‘critique without caustic’ approach – dignified and factually accurate.

Soon, very soon, the accusations began to flow in. “Dr Ashenden, you are a man filled with hate and bile” was the first. And then they came, a trickle at first, accusing me of hate, hate and even more hate.

I tried the parry. “You do know that for 15 years I was a passionate LGBT supporter until…” But the ‘until’ galvanised more energetic ad hominem internet detritus.

I was stopped in my tracks by this showering of accusation. Why always this accusation of hate?…

… It seems entirely possible that the children of the Culture of Limitless Self-Regard have no idea of the real meaning of Christian vocabulary.

Time and time again the Synodical proponents of CLSR bleated “but Jesus welcomes everyone”.

This Jesus, of course, is not the Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew chapter 25, who divides sheep and goats, light and dark, wheat and tares, good and evil. He is Jesus the fake therapist – fake because this Jesus never heals.

The children of this culture, having repudiated repentance and forgiveness and a universe with ethics built into its core, not only find themselves not healed, but turning on anyone who notices or challenges the narcissistic bubble with a reality check. For criticism must, by definition, be ‘hate’.

The Culture of Limitless Self-Regard has mined its memory and unconscious to release its anger and harnesses it as hate, which it directs towards any agency that suggests stoic or Christian restraint. It identifies any refusal to accept its demands for self-realisation or self-satisfaction on its own terms as hate.

The struggle in the Church is not one of compassion versus hate: it is one of revelation versus narcissism.

Read here

See also: Hiding from the sun: gender ideology’s attack on truth, by Gerard T Mundy, Public Discourse

“One is not simply witnessing a decay of morals among a small minority, and an increase in libertinism and lasciviousness. With gender ideology, what one sees is a fanatical minority attempting to compel the majority to conform to false teachings.”

See also: Christian opposition to TFL’s new gender-neutral greeting, by Tola Mbakwa, Premier