Is it wrong to hate if the reason is just?

Well, there's such a thing as righteous anger. Hate tends to be self destructive since it has a tendency to eat away at you. Believe me, I know.

It is not wrong to hate, but there is no doubt that it will do you more harm than good if you intend to harbor it forever. Even if your reasons are as just as they could be, it won't change that fact. The murderer, the rapist, the thief...they won't be in any way, shape or form affected by your hatred. They don't care. Your hatred won't change their hearts but it will harden yours. If you have been a witness or a victim of a crime, letting your emotions escalate to hatred with the intent of letting it go and healing your wounds is helpful, but keeping the hatred won't let your wounds heal and it might create new ones. Some people also believe that hating the perpetrator permanently keeps you apart from them, but you have to remember that hatred and other equally negative emotions are what brought them to commit those crimes in the first place. Always choose love over hate. You will feel better, your body will thank you and love will be what keeps your heart open and not let you go down the road they did.

“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.” -Buddha

It is "wrong" for two reasons:

1. Hatred poisons your heart and your emotions. Not only that, but it also poisons your body ... hatred held in your heart for decades will cause immuno-related disorders, wreck your health, and disable you (arthritis, fibromyalgia, cardiac arhythmias, cancer, etc).* Therefore, if only for YOUR well-being, you need to forgive.

2. If you have any religious sentiment, you understand that the basic message of every religion is love and forgiveness. If you are not religious, re-read #1 above.

*Modern medical theory is that you must first have the genetic predisposition for a disease, and then must have the precipitating factors. Therefore, some people will get a disease even if they don't harbor hatred. But it is accepted that certain psychological-emotional attitudes do precipitate particular disorders.

Hate ultimately ends up hurting just you, unless you act out on it and even then it ends up hurting you again. Hate leads to stress on the cardiopulmonary system which is good in the short run to trigger the flight or flee survival instinct, but prolonged hate hurts the hater physically and emotionally more. The question then becomes, is it right to cause yourself physical and emotional harm even if you feel the reason is just? I personally feel no, it's better to forgive and forget and let the transgressor be the one to hurt themselves.

There's nothing wrong with hate except for the fact that this will become your experience in life. Consider hate a seed. If you plant that seed and nurture it, it will eventually become a tree. As you continue to age and exercise your ability to hate, the hate will solidify and that will be your nature. You have to ask yourself the question if it is worth spending precious moments of your life in a state of hell or in a state of heaven? We get to choose and we get to live with the consequences. Just because someone else has decended into hell doesn't mean I have to go along for the ride.

It's not wrong to hate what was done, but regardless what is done, being raped, being robbed, killed, etc., we all still need to forgive. If we hate, then we sulk, and despise, and have our minds cluttered in so much darkness. But if we forgive (not preaching; just stating a fact), we'll be able to move on in our lives, rather than hold a grudge.

In day-to-day use, hatred is a violent feeling that impels the subject to wish another person ill and to take pleasure in bad things that happen to that person.

In "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" (1915c), Sigmund Freud wrote that the primal structure of hatred reflects the relationship to the external world that is the source of stimuli: "At the very beginning, it seems, the external world, objects, and what is hated are identical" (p. 136). The determining factor is thus the relationship to unpleasure. Freud thus asserted that "Hate, as a relation to objects, is older than love" (p. 139), for this feeling originates in the ego's self-preservation instincts rather than in the sexual instincts (although later on hatred can bind with the latter to become "sadism"). It can be inferred from this that "hatred is a kind of self-preservation, to the extent of destroying the other, while loving is a way . . . of making the other exist," as Paul-Laurent Assoun expressed it in Portrait métapsychologique de la haine: Du symptôme au lien social (Metapsychological portrait of hatred: from symptom to the social bond; 1995).

This emotion that aims to destroy thus seems to be radically opposite to love. But as Roger Dorey underscored in "L'amour au travers de la haine" (Love through hatred; 1986), there are deep affinities between the two: Not only does hatred precede love, but no doubt there is love only because there is hatred, at the very origin of the person" Indeed, in both "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" and "Negation" (1925h) Freud showed that hatred is not exclusively destructive toward the object: Acting as the first differentiating boundary between inside and outside, it ensures the permanence of that boundary and is its constituting principle. Speaking of the purified pleasure-ego, which places the characteristic of pleasure above all others, Freud wrote in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" that love "is originally narcissistic, then passes over on to objects, which have been incorporated into the extended ego, and expresses the motor efforts of the ego towards these objects as sources of pleasure" (p. 138).

But prior to the establishment of genital organization, in which love has "become the opposite of hate" (p. 139), the two earliest stages make no distinction between them. The oral stage involves incorporating and devouring the object; in the anal-sadistic stage, "the striving toward the object appears in the form of an urge for mastery, in which injury or annihilation of the object is a matter of indifference" (p. 139). It must be recalled that hatred always expresses the ego's self-preservation instincts and that both the will to power and the urge for mastery originate in hatred; before the genital stage, self-preservation of the ego is precisely what is endangered by the encounter with the object. The love/hate distinction that forms in the genital stage allows them to be linked together, bringing whole persons into being.

If hatred is experienced as the unpleasure derived from the encounter with the "other" that threatens the ego's integrity, the manner of being of this "other" must be reintroduced. With notions involving the determining role, for the baby, of the object, with its expected function as "container" of excitations, "toilet breast," or alpha function, Donald Winnicott, Donald Meltzer, and Wilfred Bion, among others, have shed new light on the treatment of hatred.

yes i think it is a waste of an emotion really. we all have felt this at sometime or another, but when you think about it, we would want to be forgiven for the wrong that we do, so we need to find it in our hearts to "do unto others as we would have done to us". in the end it is not for us to judge. we are not god. we all must learn from our mistakes and with some it won't be in this life. if there was less hate in the world we would have more peace, love and understanding.

hate is not a frightening thing.a specific food can be hateful, then what do u do with the food u hate? the only reasonable action we take against it can be not eating it again and not looking at it. nothing more. we dont hit the plate containing that food and we dont throw it at the wall . we dont curse it too .

only if the food is not going to give up and chases us whereever we go, then we have the right to punish it by any appropriate action.. LOL

i agree with those of your respondents who are essentially saying that you can hate if you want to, it is your right, it is neither right nor wrong, but it only does you harm to do so. it gives those who have wronged you the upper hand, hate begets more hate, anger begets more anger, those are feelings which will affect every cell of your being in a way that diminishes and demeans you. take that passion you clearly have and make it work for you, for something good and worthwhile, do not hand it over as a trophy to those who would delight in affecting you so.

It is neither right or wrong to love or hate, instead they are either helpful or unhelpful emotions, reasonable or unreasonable reactions, motivating or enervating, boring or enduring, silly or profound... we hate those that we want to love, if only they would just change into being what we want them to be. Hate is an emotional reaction and not a reasonable conclusion.