If you go around telling your erstwhile enemies how much you love them, toadfrog...I see a great deal of trouble and embarrassment in your future. :-) They will not have the least idea what you are talking about (assuming you even meant it in the first place), and I don't believe for one minute that that's what Jesus had in mind when he gave those teachings. It almost invariably doesn't work. Did Jesus tell the moneylenders how much he loved them before he threw them out of the temple? Declarations of love are wasted on people who don't care.

You're quite right that the wise and virtuous tend not to have any enemies...unless in the power of their wisdom they begin to effect noticeable social change! Then they suddenly have a whole lot of enemies, and very dangerous ones too. Witness what happened to Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, etc...

To "love" people, in spiritual terms means: to wish them no ill, but rather wish them well at the deepest, most profound level. This does not mean you have to love their outward personality, their outward behaviour, or anything else they are projecting onto the world around them...nor does it mean you have to PUT UP WITH IT! I don't.

Wrongdoers don't learn a thing if people put up with them, so the most loving thing you can do for them is not to put up with them. How else are they going to change?

If you don't believe people have eternal souls...or if you don't believe that the soul is intrinsically good (regardless of the rotten outer personality it may be temporarily acting through, as a result of abject fear)...then what I've said may not make sense to you at all.   

And if that's the case, so be it.

- LH

p.s. And of all the abject fear in the World, organized religion has probably cast the biggest load of it on a suffering humanity in the last few thousand years, so don't think I'm talking for some fundamentalist church. I'm not. Then there are the military organizations...they've done a pretty good job of it too, specially since the invention of the A-bomb. When people are afraid and overcrowded, they turn nasty. Same thing happens with animals. I'm frankly surprised we're doing as well as we are, considering the pressures we're all under.