Defining Hate

One of the ques­tions in that last post made me think about the def­i­n­i­tion of hate.

I also think that adding “is there any­one you hate?” might make sense. In fact, I went back and did so.

sam­bear taught his chil­dren that to say you hate some­one means that you want that per­son dead. 

I find it use­ful to think of hate as the oppo­site of love in some ways, but not in others.

To love some­one is to act in that per­son­’s best inter­ests, to active­ly care for them. 

Hate dri­ves some peo­ple to active­ly try to harm anoth­er. I’ve been tar­get­ed by that kind of person.

I don’t under­stand, hon­est­ly, what makes some­one put ener­gy into main­tain­ing a rela­tion­ship with some­one they hate. The only ener­gy I put into such things is to make sure that per­son can­not harm me and mine and to pro­tect oth­ers if I can do that in some way. I do not find such peo­ple worth attack­ing. I have bet­ter things to do with my time and energy.

There are def­i­nite­ly peo­ple I hate in this world. Every one of them has delib­er­ate­ly done harm to me or some­one I love. None of those peo­ple were act­ing in self-defense. They attacked because they want­ed to cause harm. I con­sid­er them evil.

If, how­ev­er, I was to attack them sole­ly to cause harm, I would low­er myself to their lev­el. They aren’t worth that. Not even close.