For Funwithrage. As a present.
I did a search recently, in several English versions of the Bible, for the word "hate." What I found was somewhat remarkable. On not one occasion does Scripture tell us that we are never to hate. Just doesn't happen. The incidences are actually astonishing in number, but they all support the proposal of that most enraged of prophets, Amos: "Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish justice in the gate." This is a very different image than the traditional "gentle Jesus meek and mild," who was more of a teaching tool for Victorian children than a serious attempt to construct a picture of Christ.
Now, Paul does tell us that we are not to be angry. Sadly, I do not read Greek yet, but on the English end, I believe we are onto something. From what little I understand, neuroscientifically, anger and hatred are not substantively different emotions. As I recall, what we would traditionally call hatred does have some more frontal lobe involvement than pure anger (as would be expected; the frontal lobe is highly implicated in decision-making.) We may thus validly imagine hatred to be anger with the assent of abstract reason. I will also note, as it seems to confuse many, that hatred is not an extreme form of anger (okay, linguistically it can be, but that doesn't make it a good model.) Annoyance is mild anger, just as hatred is concentrated disdain. They differ in species, not degree. Now, back to Paul, it is in our fallen nature to become angry when something inconveniences us. But most people in our culture, secular or religious, will agree that if one is inconvenienced by chance (or due justice), rather than malice or negligence, it is foolish to dwell or act on such impulses. If we all did, society would rapidly collapse.
All the same, reason and Scripture both inform us that were we to abandon all hatred, that is, the emotional impulse we feel when we believe something to be not only obnoxious but categorically wrong, society would have a decent shot at precisely the same thing. If we stopped hating the acts of rape, murder, theft, and the like, if we mortified our sense of outrage entirely, human justice would die. On a full and honest reading of Scripture and tradition, Christianity very seldom teaches us to abandon any component of our spiritual makeup; it seeks instead to transform them. We are still to feel anger, but we are to feel anger only at what is actually wrong, that is, what God hates.
Now, a few qualifications: 1) This doesn't mean that everyone should be you, funwithrage; just as some people are born without a very great intellect, or without inborn empathy, others are born without much of the gift of outrage. This doesn't excuse them from feeling it at all, but it will likely not be among their primary tools. The variety of spiritual gifts is another post, but nonetheless, not everyone can be you. This is very good; it provides you your niche, and grants you a special order within the ranks of the heavenly army. 2) It also doesn't mean that we should always do the most obvious, impulsive thing with our outrage (that is, physically or verbally attack it,) just as we shouldn't jump right on anyone to whom we're sexually attracted. As Amos says, the end of both the love of good and the hatred of evil is the establishment of justice. That is the goal, and any just use of hatred must be in its service. 3) Finally, it does not excuse us from a continuous evaluation of our own moral stance. This gift is obviously among the most dangerous humans are given: when it corrupts, it corrupts hard. One can easily point more fingers than one has at those who are both loud and incorrect on the distinction between good and evil; without a great deal of vigilance, there is little reason beyond axiomatic pride to believe that one is much more correct.
If you ever want to read a work of blazingly allegorical Christian literature, in large part involving traditional gender roles (which you, funwithrage, clearly don't, which is a pity, as it's frickin' amazing,) C.S. Lewis' Perelandra has a passage that you would just love. In it, the main character is facing off against another character who has, quite literally, been possessed by Satan. Indeed, as you are not entirely likely to make it through the rest of the book just now, I will quote:
"Then an experience that perhaps no good man can ever have in our world came over him - a torrent of perfectly unmixed and lawful hatred. The energy of hating, never before felt without some guilt, without some dim knowledge that he was failing fully to distinguish sinner from sin, rose into his arms and legs till he felt that they were pillars of burning blood. What was before him appeared no longer a creature of corrupted will. It was corruption itself to which will was attached only as an instrument... It is perhaps difficult to understand why this filled Ransom not with horror but with a kind of joy. The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for. As a boy with an axe rejoices on finding a tree, or a boy with a box of coloured chalks rejoices on finding a pile of perfectly white paper, so he rejoiced in the perfect congruity between his emotion and its object. Bleeding and trembling with weariness as he was, he felt that nothing was beyond his power, and when he flung himself upon the living Death, the eternal Surd in the universal mathematic, he was astonished, and yet (on a deeper level) not astonished at all, at his own strength... He felt that he could so fight, so hate with a perfect hatred, for a whole year."
Now, C.S. Lewis was writing in the era of WWII. Christian fantasy in our current age really should reflect a more nuanced view of good and evil to be of much use (which sadly, I do not see to date, though when I've had time, I have been trying to write some.) And still, Lewis is not at all wrong; he has established that Ransom is in fact not fighting "against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."
I know, and hear in you, that on some small level, you (mildly) dislike what you do with your hatred now. You call yourself "mean," and profess to like it, but your reason stands fully against meanness in the abstract (say, against service workers.) At the same time, you (and this goes for a lot of people, not just funwithrage) see it as better to hold onto this impulse in yourself than attempt to ablate it entirely. On some level, you perceive that the "meanness" is a suppression of something vital. Better to have it do something useless and a bit petty than simply kill it and all the good it might someday do.
You are correct, on most counts. I know that I've told you otherwise in the past; I was in large part wrong, indeed, I think you had the better part of the truth. But you weren't all right. You will have to kill the meanness if you want the real, "Righteous Wrath" you often describe. The meanness is a degraded form, unsuited to the dignity of the real Creature; with the parasite, your just hatred will always be misdirected, inefficient, and in some small part, rightly ashamed of what it has become. If you kill the wretch, you may well find that, like an atrophied muscle, your sense of real justice will be a bit weak at first, and uncertain what to do with itself. But with a bit of physical therapy, it will grow far stronger than it ever was. And if you learn to use it, very well, you could stop thinking of yourself as mean, and still be all that you should. And that is well worth the effort, as you are unique in Creation, and Heaven has never, and will never*, wish you to be anything but what you should be.
And it would seem to my eyes that Heaven would rather like you to get out there and kick ass for God. Though I could be wrong.
*Tenses rhetorically necessary, though profoundly inaccurate.