H,
There is always a need to separate things running through to the human
experience. We are built to understand things in differences; one thing
compared to another with the quality of their distinction. This can also make
us victims of seeing other people as exactly only that. We do not equate their
weakness to our own or their wrongdoing to our own or their sins to our own and
so we cannot grant them the forgiveness we must grant ourselves to live a
healthy life.
This obsession with having any sides at all, with framing all our
arguments in truth to win and to getting that unique sense of pre-schadenfreude
over the idea of these lost others going to hell is at the start of a dangerous
road to the destruction of our humanity.
Empathy, understanding, kindness are all the traits of ordinary love we
must have to truly be like the Christ we say we follow. There are no others in
the kingdom. As the poets say, there is only us.