I think you can’t spreadsheet your way through emotions — there isn’t a scoresheet that sorts them into a tidy “Good” column and an equally neat “Bad” column. I don’t think you can banish feelings you dislike and license only the pleasant ones.

I think what’s possible is learning to recognize what you’re feeling, fully experiencing it, and choosing deliberately how to direct that energy. Regulating actions and words. I think you can’t stop feelings from arising.

Life improves when you practice feeling deliberately, however imperfect the process, instead of suppressing emotions until they blow up.

if hate is categorically bad

Well, it’s not.

I hate rape. I hate blatant, dangerous immorality. Hatred is rarely appropriate, but rarely does not mean never. There is a time for everything, after all. Now, if you’re not making a bad faith argument, get diagnosed for the tisms and reassess your statements.

Sometimes hate just is. Ain’t nothing going to cause me to not hate cilantro. Just because I hate it though does not mean I wish harm to it. I just want to avoid it.

I think you’re being downvoted because hatred is fueling the world.

After I lost my belief in free will, I also seem to have lost my ability to feel hate. I haven’t felt that in years - almost a decade. To me, hate is just a story you’re telling yourself to stay angry. I don’t tell myself such stories.

I can still feel annoyed, irritated, or dislike someone, but hate is incompatible with my worldview. And I don’t mean “hate” in the casual way people use it in everyday speech - I mean true hatred. I can’t hate an object, because it just is and couldn’t be otherwise. But in the same way, I can’t hate people either, because while I think they have the ability to act differently in the future, I don’t believe they could have acted differently in the past once something has already been done.

Hating someone for what they are seems to imply they should’ve been different, which makes no sense. If someone is being an asshole, it’s not their fault - they can’t help themselves. I might not want to be around that person, but I don’t hate them. It’s like hating the rain or the darkness.

@quacky@lemmy.world

It’s an interesting reflection because I’ve been noticing a similar phenomenon regarding words such as “demon”, “evil”, “dark”, among other words.

The concept of “demonizing” itself does exactly what the word describes, to the word “demon”.

Since I became a demonolater and follower of Left-hand path spirituality, I get a similar feeling whenever I see people using these words in such a way that it implies “demons are undesirables”, “evil is undesirable”, “dark is undesirable”, even “Satan is undesirable” and “Lucifer is undeirable”.

Then people go farther and use these words to describe people or actions, people or actions of which are extremely despicable.

Example: people saying that “Charlie Kirk went to hell with Satan”, implicitly associating Satan (and demons) with the far-right bigotry. As a demonolater, I sincerely ask people: please, use whatever adjectives (gross, f-word, despicable, etc) to describe those bigoted individuals, but don’t do gratuitous attacks on entities (and their worshipers) who have nothing to do with those bigoted individuals, because you’re implicitly and unwillingly attacking whole belief systems (Luciferianism, theistic Satanism, Thelema, Goëtia, Quimbanda, etc).

Demons aren’t evil! The word originally derived from Greek Daemon, meaning neuter spirits, then it was distorted to mean “evil”. Even “evil” isn’t necessarily a despicable thing, evilness can be positive just like goodness can be negative.

All these connotations were imposed binary concepts (us vs them), meant to keep people under control by depicting rebelliousness as something to be avoided.

Do you wonder why demons and Satan were “demonized”? Try to think if society recognized the Luciferian rebellion against the dictatorship of God as something desirable, how society would behave, how “populace” would behave? People wouldn’t be easy to control if they were to see rebelliousness as desirable and “heavenly authority” as undesirable. People wouldn’t be easily convinced to be cogs in a machine. Instead of rebelling, society learned to “give the other face” whenever their face is slapped, because “Jesus said that”.

Turning “demons” and “Lucifer” (which originally means light bringer) and “Satan” (originally meaning “adversary”) and names/words alike as synonyms for things to be avoided was all about control, and this thing keeps happening even among those who don’t even believe there are demons, because we are prone to imitate other’s social behaviors unconsciously.

So, yeah, the phenomenon you described can be traced back to control, religious control.