Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago taht I must hate a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, the sin but not the sinner. For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distrinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life–namely myself.

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