"...we might try to understand exactly what loving your neighbour
as yourself means...how exactly do I love myself?
Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of
fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy
my own society. So apparently 'Love your neighbour' does not
mean 'feel fond of him' or 'find him attractive'...
Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? Well, I am
afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments)
but that is not why I love myself. In fact it is the other way round:
my self-love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice
is not why I love myself. So loving my enemies does not apparently
mean thinking them nice either. That is an enormous relief...
Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me
long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man:
or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner. For a long time I used
to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: 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."
C.S. Lewis, from Mere Christianity
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