On the Spiritual Virtue of Strategic Hatred
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A Divinity who is merely a happy-clappy fluff-bunny and does not unleash Its venom and vengeful justice upon the unjust and iniquitous who deserve it is no Deity worthy of love and worship in my Book. Contemporary Christians take their Christ as if he was Mr Rogers while they miss the fire and brimstone Jesus (ع) of Matthew who curses the scribes and pharisees to their faces in the Temple before going rockstar in it overturning the stalls of the usurers and money lenders. Muhammad (ص) renames His own uncle Abu Lahab (the father of hellfire) and literally curses him in the 111th chapter of the Quran, saying "may his hand shake," which in the language of Revelation from the 6th century CE is the Messenger of God's way of telling that oppressing and unjust infidel bastard to go and f*ck himself! Fatima (ع) did the same to those who usurped Her inheritance and the rights of Her Family. The Book of Exodus (15:3) literally calls "the Lord...a man of war!"
Go to the far-eastern traditions and you see the same thing happening, like Krishna telling Arjuna to massacre his unjust and corrupt relatives on the battlefield and not abide by any rules of fair-play and engagement with them in order to get the job done. Buddhism and Taoism also have their fair share of fire and brimstone and are not by any stretch of the imagination happy-clappy, puff and fluff in their original cultural setting.
Gnostic gospels, like the Apocryphon of James, literally say that hypocrisy and evil should be hated, making the sentiment a virtue in such specific instances. Hatred of the counter-powers of darkness (druj) is an enshrined principle of Zarathushtra's creed in the Avesta, and did I mention Rumi's famous poem using explicit expletives in his Diwan to tell a mullah in Konya to go and f himself? And this is what Aquinas, the greatest schoolman of the Roman Catholic church, has to say about anger:
He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust ~ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica.
But somewhere along the line, especially in modern times, the spiritual virtue of anger and wrath was proscribed and demonized by a passive-aggressive unmanly all-male Christian priesthood - esp. Protestants - who passed on this BS over to the secular New Age and its assorted derivatives who perpetuate an unhealthy culture of passive-aggression that is confusing at best and spawning of mental illness at worst. Luckily, pristine Shi'ism - and not that of the ayatollahs of the seminary - kept the practice of bara'a (disavowal and imprecation) because it has understood that it is healthy, salutary and the height of virtue for the true believers to blow off many degrees of steam at the enemies of Those Whom they Love.
The Spirit - the True Spirit - always draws red lines in the sand and always will react through its manifold vehicles to those who cross those red lines. I do the same without any apologies: https://wahidazal303.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-tablet-of-wrath-qadabiya.html
And a theological point to this is that without God's wrath, Its Mercy can never be understood; without hatred of the false, the Love of the True can never be fathomed; and vice versa. There is a dialectic in place, and this dialectic exists for a reason. To negate it, is to negate telos and fall into precisely the disenchanted universe the (post)modern subject has fallen into! Anyone who says differently does not know the True Living God of Existence and, to paraphrase Rumi, is merely bent on the side of the road because, as the example of the true prophets, messengers and saints shows, spiritual pacifism is merely crowd control for the benefit of ruling elites and their agenda! QED
