GOD IS HATE! (Please read to the end)

When I first wrote the article titled "The Image of God” and published it online, controversies trailed my claim that hatred is a Godly trait. Many religious people and scriptures users disagreed with my claim saying, God is love and it is impossible to have hate in him at the same time.

They quoted several scriptures that supported their claims that God is love, but not one that says God is hate or claim that he has hate in him, thus my claim was not accepted by a single person. That was bad, and even worse as I lost friends as a result, they felt I was one of the fake prophets that Jesus prophesied would crop up in the end time.

The problem I have with these set of people is their ability to skillfully quote the scriptures and lack of basic understanding in the contextualization of the same scriptures.

I said to the few ones, who had the courage to stand me in arguments that they have problem quoting the scripture without understanding.

Some called me an evil genius, some say I'm Satan and some say I have a vein philosophy, but none of these is true.

Pastor J.S Ajulo, the General overseer of Bible believers Church ministry in Nigeria once said

“A good, balanced student of theology does not form a doctrine around one scripture."

The people who claim overall understanding of a particular scripture by quoting a verse or two are simply bad and unbalanced students of theology.

This is my claim: "Without hatred, love would have been unjustified and unproven. God created both, have them in him and transferred them to us his images. We only abuse their purposes."

If love is said to come from God, what about hate?

I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies.

(Amos 5:21 KJV)

That was God using hate which means he has the ability to hate and that justifies my claim that God has hate in him as much as love. God is love to Human beings, other creations and mankind but he's hate to evil so when I say God is hate I actually meant he's hate to evil. Can God love evil? If you believe he can't, what then does he feel about evil?

Researchers are on the hunt for the neurological underpinnings of hate. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) has begun to reveal how the strong emotion starts to emerge in the brain, though it is still an ongoing inconclusive research.

Neurobiologist Semir Zeki of University College London's Laboratory of Neurobiology, led a study years back that scanned the brains of 17 adults as they gazed at images of a person they professed to hate. Across the board, areas in the medial frontal gyrus, right putamen, promoter cortex and medial insular activated. Parts of this so-called "Hate circuit," the researchers noted, are also involved in initiating aggressive behavior, but feelings of aggression itself such as anger and fear show different patterns in the brain than hate does.

Most definitely, loathing can spring from positive feelings, such as romantic love (in the guise of a former partner or perceived rival) but love seems to deactivate areas traditionally associated with condemnation aspect of judgment, whereas hate (red) activates areas in the frontal cortex that may be involved in evaluating another person and predicting their behavior.

Talking about hate, some commonalities with love, however, are striking, the study authors noted.

The areas of the putamen and insular that are activated by individual hate are the same as those for romantic love. ”This linkage may account for why love and hate are so closely linked to each other in life,"

This initial study, however, failed to convince everyone that researchers have uncovered the neurological root of hate.

"This is really early in the game," says Scott Huettel, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, who was not involved in the study. Other emotions, such as happiness and sadness are much better understood, he said: "Even things like regret have some pretty clear neural coordinates."  The next step, Huettel points out, will be to conduct more research on clearly defined aspects and types of hate, including group hate rather than that aimed at individuals—then test them across several different situations. "It will also be important", he noted, to look for cases in which parts of the brain have been impaired and emotional tendencies have changed.

Once you show the positive activation and impairment when the brain region is damaged, you have good evidence that you have at least part of the circuit," he says. What purpose the emotion of hate serves is also still up for conjecture. Although I believe that the feeling has an evolutionary advantage if rightly utilized. For instance, it might help an individual decide whom to be close to and who to desist from." Huettel argued thus:  "like pinpointing a dedicated neural circuit, are at that point just educated guesses", they are simply inconclusive.

Biblically, the Old and the New Testaments deal with hate. Ecclesiastes 3:8 teaches that there is a "time to love, and a time to hate;”.

The writer of Ecclesiastes wasn't wrong, what we should ask is; who and what should we hate?

However, the Old Testament also contains condemnations of hate. For example,

Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him.

(Leviticus 16:17-18KJV)

The New Testament emphasizes on the evil of hate, John also regarded hating fellow human beings as murder.

Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer and you know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in himself.

(1 John 3:15 KJV)

It is impossible to “hate” and “love” the same person at the same time but does that mean God has no hate in him?

No! Before this can be fully understood we need to know the attributes of hate, what perfect hate is and the relationship between love and hate to know if they can be related to God.

This write-up is adapted from “THE IMAGE OF GOD” a book written by Soul’e Rhymez.

For your own copy, contact: Stephen on: +2348163800077 or send email to: soulerhymez@gmail.com