[dsc]

“I’m a Christian, and I know when I hate, I’m violating what Jesus said was the 2nd most important of the commands: love my neighbor as I love myself. Thus I know I’m in the wrong.”

Don’t want to be confrontational, but I think you are completely in the right.

Perhaps it would be profitable to explore some other theological approaches to this.

[Vision Thing]

One theological approach I considered was trying to discern what exactly Jesus meant by loving your neighbor as yourself.

When Jesus was asked about it, instead of telling us to have good feelings towards others, he gave us the Good Samaritan parable, wherein he describes loving your neighbor as an act of taking care of a neighbor who is in trouble. This has nothing to do with forcing yourself to have a feeling for this neighbor.

So Jesus is saying loving your neighbor is not a feeling, but an act of taking care of them if they are in need.

In the context of this thread, some of us Christians (including me) have expressed some hatred for Obama. If we were to try to apply the good samaritan example to our stance towards obama, it doesn't seem to apply towards our feelings for obama. Actually, it doesn't apply at all because obama is in no danger and needs no help from us.

To take this further, Jesus was hostile towards the pharisees. In other words, he expressed no warm feelings (loving his neighbors) towards them. And since these people were in great financial, social, physical, and political shape, they definitely were in no need of help from a good samaritan such as Jesus.

So to wrap it all up, Jesus may not view my emotional hatred for obama as a violation of the command to love my neighbor. But if I were to encounter obama while he was in a physically vulnerable state and I were to leave him as is, then Jesus would judge it as my failure to love my neighbor.