THE BASIC DEADLY SIN, PRIDE

Is pride the basic sin, the one that makes them all? 

The Seven Deadly Sins are the sins from which all other sins come. They are ingredients.

The list in The Catholic Catechism of Christian Doctrine goes: pride, gluttony, greed, envy, sloth, lust and anger.

The Church says pride is a sin for it is needing and wanting others and perhaps even God to fail so that you can seem superior. The Church says that there is a virtue called magnamity which means you want to be great for God and that you depend on him for this greatness. It denies that this is pride. If you want to be great for yourself that is pride and wanting an advantage over others. But if you want to be great for God that is still wanting an advantage. It is in fact worse to want to be great in the eyes of a perfect God than it is to want to be great in your own sight.
 
Pride is the root of all the deadly sins. It is the ultimate sin from which the other six deadly sins proceed. Pride is the sin of thinking you can do without God and by implication those who are his instruments.  It is seen as a distorted self-love, it is too much love for yourself and this is love you are taking from others and even from God.  Pride means you think you know better than God what is right and disobey him by becoming angry or slothful or covetous etc. St Thomas Aquinas taught that pride was the ultimate sin and he defined it as taking credit for your own achievements and not attributing them entirely to the work of God. For example, Jesus said as often as you hurt one of his brethren you hurt him. So when you get praise you should respond, “Give it to God for my actions not me”. (Of course Christianity is so hypocritical it won't do that.) This arises from the Christian notion that God gives us every second of our lives and we would turn back into the nothing we came from if he took his power away. We owe him everything. It arises also from the notion that God gives you help to do good works for him. He puts holy thoughts in your head and holy desires in your heart and heals the weakness in your will that draws you to sin. Christians are forbidden to boast or glory in their good deeds (Romans 4, Ephesians 2). They believe God has given a plan for salvation that gives us no reason to think we do anything worthwhile of ourselves but that God does it for and in and through us. In reality, pride is thought to be equal to self-esteem.
 
The opposite of pride is humility. Humility is seeing yourself as no better than what you are. The stronger a person's belief and trust in God is, the more humble they can be in the Christian scheme. The more you believe you depend on God to exist and that he is behind the good you do more than you are the more humble you will be. The person of weak faith or the atheist thinks or believes that he makes himself what he is. The Church sees that as the sin of pride. Even if a Christian were to make the mistake of thinking it is not a sin to be an atheist, she will have to believe that atheism directly and indirectly causes sin. It is not sinful in itself then but leads to sin and thus there can be no salvation or Heaven for the atheist.
 
If an atheist can't be truly humble and has to fake humility is that the kind of person you would want to employ or marry? Christian morality threatens the rights of atheists. It certainly raises the question, "Should I discriminate?" That alone is intolerable enough.
 
The humility of the Christians is faked. If your existence depends on nature or God, that does not mean you are unable to be a self-made person. God and nature will give you the power to be what you want to be. So the Christians are lying about their dependence on God being humbling. They slander the atheist who says he finds his dependence on nature humbling. They call him a liar at least in their hearts. Even the most arrogant billionaire knows he depends on certain things to allow him to be what he is. That does not affect his arrogance. He is in fact arrogant because of it. He feels threatened which is why he needs to be arrogant. Arrogance is about self-protection. Are Christians using God to hide their own pride of which they are ashamed?
 
The atheist or religious sceptic learns to accept that his life is short and that apart from friends and family there is nobody to care about him. He is not greedy for love and accepts what he has. The believer is unsatisfied. Out of greed and pride he wants to think he is loved by God. Only the sceptic about God or the unbeliever in God has the power to minimise what are called the deadly sins. Religion actually thrives on them. No wonder it is generally so ineffectual in stopping the sins and indeed other sins too.
 
The Christians can never prove that God wants them to have the thoughts and feelings they have. They say evil is a reality. God has to have strange ways to keep it in some kind of check. He could ask you to suffer depression forever for some good purpose. It is the height of arrogance to claim that your good thoughts and feelings are really directly sent by God. You are making yourself judge over God.
 
The Christian who does good and says it is all down to God is denying the Christian doctrine of personal responsibility. Even if God helps you do the good you are responsible for it. You may be using his resources but it is still your work. The Christian is telling a barefaced lie when she says that her good works show only the power of God in her life and that she is nothing . There is no authentic humility in that.
 
The atheist can be humble. The believer cannot.
 
Christianity says it should be understood as a faith that works to make us humble in the sight of God. Jesus atoned for sins and rose from the dead to save us from sin - specifically pride. But it can't make us humble. It makes us hypocrites. The whole faith is a hoax and a sham. When the foundation is fraudulent the whole structure is no better.
 
The Christian man and woman dress up for Church. Do they really want people to think, “I praise you God for these people looking so well!”? and never, “They look well.” Do they really want people to keep the focus on God and not them?
 
If Christianity opposes pride, the result will be the harassment and pressuring and downgrading of people who don’t have a strong faith. The Church wants to create an addiction not to God but to the Church's claims about God and what he has said. This is an extreme love of control and power.
 
There is nothing wrong with rational realistic pride.
 
The way pride is linked to God and made a sin implies that atheists and people who are not sure of God’s existence are dangerous and full of pride. They are sinners if pride is a sin and we are to give all the glory to God. It is a sectarian bigoted idea. For Christians to teach it is sheer arrogance. They are being prideful. We cannot get away from our pride. We can warp it, we can hide it, we can disguise it, but it is still there.
 
Christianity teaches that since we are to love God with all our hearts and be willing to be tortured to death for him if we were asked to suffer that that all failures with respect to love for God manifest the sin of pride. To be glad then that God called you to be a priest and as a result you have prestige in your community and a swanky house and car instead of asking you to suffer dreadfully for him would be the sin of pride. It shows that you are glad not to have had the chance to prove your complete love for God.
 
The experts all disagree on what God has said so to avoid the sin of pride you have to submit in humility to men telling you what to think about God and this concept is what you call God. It is really a form of idolatry.
 
The Church ignores the fact that if you put so much value on your interpretation of evidence for God and on your understanding of God that you would die for it, that is pride in the extreme! You never die for God but for your understanding of God and the reasons he might be thought to exist!
 
With religion there are far more shoulds and shouldn'ts than there would be without it. There are all those extra rules to be kept. If you say somebody should do something, you are saying you know better than they do and they are bad if they do not do what you say. Religion then with all the extra shoulds is actually exacerbating pride! It is easily seen why the bitterest and most evil-minded people out there are often to be found in the chapel.
 
The happy Christian is always a haughty one. He smugly thinks he is in God's in group. He thinks he is being saved from sin which makes him superior to those who are not bothering much with God and his saving grace. He says he is a sinner and being healed. He says he sins and that seems to make him humble but not when he claims that he is being saved from it. He refers to his sins to bolster his pride. "Oh I am so great for I admit my sins.

Pride is a complex subject and  you can be sure that if atheists have it so does everybody else.



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