I’d say the most important property is whether being Catholic is part of one’s identity. Specifically “I admire those who are better Catholics than myself and consider them to be holier and more virtuous people than myself. I feel somewhat guilty about not being more like them.”
I take your point, but that gives the notional I-hate-Catholics guy a pretty difficult task of differentiation, since plenty of people who identify as Catholics—if you asked them if they were Catholics, they’d say yes—don’t mean that. They mean “I was baptized”. So a more accurate statement for IHC guy would be “I hate Catholics who do/say/believe X, Y or Z—though I don’t count as real Catholics, and therefore do not hate, people who refer to themselves as Catholics but who don’t do/say/believe X, Y or Z”. Even among self-identified Catholics who do the odd bit of practicing—midnight Mass at Christmas, funeral services, praying to St. Anthony when they’ve lost their keys—many don’t align with Catholic dogma on many subjects (pre-marital sex, contraception etc.). Identifying as Catholic means a different thing to them than the Pope would like it to, but they still do it.
And if IHC guy instead says “I assume that everyone who claims to be a Catholic means that they do/say/believe X, Y and Z, and therefore I will hate everybody who describes themselves as Catholic”, then that’s where “useless and irrational” comes in—because he’s including in his hatred people who don’t actually do/say/believe the actual things he has a problem with. That’s the basic problem with attributing a negative characteristic to a huge group of people—the likelihood that it holds true for all group members diminishes as group-size goes up, unless the group is specifically defined as “people who have done X”.
This is more-or-less where we disagree. Yes, you could define such a category by using a fractal shaped boundary, but it’s unclear why it would be relevant to the question of whether one should hate members of that category.
I think my point above goes to this. If you hate the crime of murder then it makes sense that you would direct your hate at every “murderer”. By definition they have done the thing you object to. Russians, however, are not alcoholics by definition, so hating Russians for being drunks makes no sense. With big demographic groups, your hate cannot be directed at a specific action that they all, by definition, must have taken—except, as you pointed out, in the case of freely-chosen political party membership, but then only in the case that you consider membership of that party in and of itself, regardless of other actions or beliefs such an awful thing a as to deserve hatred.
I take your point, but that gives the notional I-hate-Catholics guy a pretty difficult task of differentiation, since plenty of people who identify as Catholics—if you asked them if they were Catholics, they’d say yes—don’t mean that. They mean “I was baptized”. So a more accurate statement for IHC guy would be “I hate Catholics who do/say/believe X, Y or Z—though I don’t count as real Catholics, and therefore do not hate, people who refer to themselves as Catholics but who don’t do/say/believe X, Y or Z”. Even among self-identified Catholics who do the odd bit of practicing—midnight Mass at Christmas, funeral services, praying to St. Anthony when they’ve lost their keys—many don’t align with Catholic dogma on many subjects (pre-marital sex, contraception etc.). Identifying as Catholic means a different thing to them than the Pope would like it to, but they still do it.
And if IHC guy instead says “I assume that everyone who claims to be a Catholic means that they do/say/believe X, Y and Z, and therefore I will hate everybody who describes themselves as Catholic”, then that’s where “useless and irrational” comes in—because he’s including in his hatred people who don’t actually do/say/believe the actual things he has a problem with. That’s the basic problem with attributing a negative characteristic to a huge group of people—the likelihood that it holds true for all group members diminishes as group-size goes up, unless the group is specifically defined as “people who have done X”.
I think my point above goes to this. If you hate the crime of murder then it makes sense that you would direct your hate at every “murderer”. By definition they have done the thing you object to. Russians, however, are not alcoholics by definition, so hating Russians for being drunks makes no sense. With big demographic groups, your hate cannot be directed at a specific action that they all, by definition, must have taken—except, as you pointed out, in the case of freely-chosen political party membership, but then only in the case that you consider membership of that party in and of itself, regardless of other actions or beliefs such an awful thing a as to deserve hatred.
Thanks for clarifying.