Keith Twombley has the situation half-correct in his “Polite Rebuttal.” God does not hate people. However, “hating the sin and not the sinner” is a defensible statement. God hates sin, which is the disobedience of man, but by His amazing grace, He does not hate the sinner.

How does this work? A man who is slapped has two responses: to forgive his assaulter or to respond in anger and bitterness. However, barring that he is a masochist, in neither case will he take pleasure in being assaulted. God takes no pleasure in sin, but He will forgive and forget every past and future sin of those who receive Him.

Also, the man has no power on his own to force his assaulter to repent. In the same way, God cannot force a man to repent (And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done — Romans 1:28), short of violating the man’s free will. It is not God, but the sinner who chooses estrangement.

Perhaps Mr. Twombley should also grab a philosophy professor and ask him what a “categorical error” is.

Unless Twombley wants to argue that homosexual acts are as inseparable from a homosexual as being black is to a black (or as being human is to a human), he might find himself in disagreement with the majority of the educated, non-Pat Buchanan-supporting world which believes that there is more to the humanity of homosexuals than sexual acts.

Dan NguyenSophomoreComputer engineering