The Bible God proclaims your self-esteem to be a sin!

God does not need to make us even if he does. He does not need to own us. He should let us be gifts to ourselves. We have no need to be owned by him either.

Self-esteem is when you see yourself as a good and decent person who deserves good things. It involves seeing yourself as self-made. The notion of God encourages people to put themselves down. Religious believers may suffer from an inferiority complex. To compensate for the horrible feelings they have towards themselves, they may develop a superiority complex. If you feel weak and helpless, you can over-compensate by telling yourself how God is on your side and how powerful your prayers to him are. A person may develop a superiority complex with regard to driving. Because they think they can do nothing right, they may think that they are exceptional drivers and feel invincible. They exaggerate how good they are at driving. But they will learn the truth the hard way. Religion gives people God and people fall for the bait because religion insulates the doctrine of God against the reality. For example, the believer is told that if prayer seems to fail it actually is working despite appearances. The superiority complex in religion is mistaken by society and psychiatry as acceptable and makes believers often seem normal and ordinary. The truth is actually very different and very disturbing. They are still ill. Abraham felt his faith was invincible when he was going to murder his son as a sacrifice at God's behest. This was his superiority complex at work. Yet he also felt he didn't deserve his son - that was the inferiority complex at work.
 
Secure self-esteem is not ruined by somebody insulting you. Insecure self-esteem is and may lead to resentment and violence. Christians have always refused to make the distinction as they wish to uphold persons with insecure self-esteem as examples of how self-esteem in general is bad. The Christians say you should only think about how God makes you what you are and not you. So rather than value yourself for yourself only God matters. Some people feel okay about that but they turn very vicious if God is criticised for that is criticising their crutch. They have no self-esteem and use faith in God as a crutch for dealing with it.
 
The true Christian believer holds that the Bible was authored by God and has no error.

 

The Bible is not a fan of self-esteem, "They sweep past like the wind and are gone. But they are deeply guilty, for their own strength is their god", Habakkuk 1:1.

 

The Catholic Bible in the Book of Ecclesiasticus/Sirach 14:5 says that a person who is mean to others is doing so for he is mean to himself. The context is about misers. But it argues that harming yourself is a fast track to harming others. This says you should be about other people.  So it is not saying you deserve a good life.  It is saying you should not even think about that and only look after yourself for it will make you harm others.

 

St Paul wrote that each one of us must esteem the other more than ourselves.  Against the view that we are all equal, he advocates false humility.  It is a lie to tell yourself that the other is better and more worthy than you.  And remember the other here means anyone from the thief to the vicious Roman centurion.

 

The view of Jesus that all the love in us must be centred in God rejects any attempt to concentrate on working up self-esteem. 

 

In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul declares that you should not have sex outside marriage because you are not your own property when you follow Christ but you belong to the Lord for you have been bought and paid for. If I am not my own then how could I have any regard for self-esteem then? Self-esteem means I consider myself to be my own property and to be an okay person. If God existed you would be his property so he and his representatives would have the right to slap you down firmly if you try to be independent of him.
 
Paul asserted that you must not treat your body as you please for Jesus bought it at a price so it belongs to God (1 Corinthians 6). You must not have sex outside marriage. This certainly suggests that just as you have the right to tell on a person you see shoplifting, you have a bigger right to order them to obey God and not have sex outside wedlock. You are God's property as they are and so you have the right to stand up for God and the duty for you are his property and must speak for him. God comes first in this thinking. You are to esteem your being God's property. You are to base everything you do on that concept. You do not base it on self-esteem.
 
In 1 Corinthians 13:3, Paul says that if he suffered and sacrificed and even died for others it would be no good without love. The love he means is love for God for he is loving others when he does these things for them. You are not going to die for others for a bad uncaring reason.  The Bible says that unless an act is done for the love of God alone it is dirt no matter how much good it does.
 
Jesus told the Parable about the good-living and decent Pharisee who was condemned by God for seeing himself as good (Luke 18). A Tax Collector who was repenting of his sin and terrible life was declared to be right with God. Clearly then self-esteem is a sin.
 
The doctrine of St Paul is that people are masters at self-deception and cannot do good that pleases God without his grace (Romans 3). The prophet Jeremiah taught that nothing will deceive you better than your own heart which is why God alone can test it (Jeremiah 17:9). Such teachings mean that that if you really love God above all things you will act it and live the hardest life possible for that is the only proof of your sincerity. Otherwise you increase the likelihood that you could be blinded by yourself for even the holiness of the saints is stained by sin (1 John 1:8).
 
Christianity is an example of a religion that has books that God supposedly wrote in which suffering is encouraged. It opposes self-esteem telling you to imagine that others are better than you (Philippians 2:3).
 
Christians are told to believe that they can no good without God helping them all the time for they are so useless (Romans 7). Verses that speak of confidence (Philippians 4:13; 1 Corinthians 11:1) say it comes from God so this confidence is not self-esteem but trusting that God will make good of you though you are useless. To teach that we are precious not because we think so but because God does (1 Peter 1:18,19) is really to say that what we think is useless. So if that is true how can we think we are precious? We only think it because of God and not because of the worth and goodness we see in ourselves - we are commanded to think it because God says so. The teaching commands blind faith in dogma. The teaching is bad for us and forbids self-esteem. If you don’t believe in thinking you cannot really believe in anything for belief is a kind of thinking so the teaching seeks to crush your self-love entirely and leave nothing only self-deception. Any faith that opposes self-esteem is evil.
 
Perhaps we should enjoy ourselves because God wants us to, that is, to please him and not ourselves? But if we should do this, it is not because we should be happy but because God should be pleased. In other words, we should not be happy. It is easy to think that your motives in accepting happiness are selfless and godly. Perhaps they are not. You can’t be happy if you think your wellbeing is not entitled to be looked after and only sacrifice for God matters. God should not command us to be happy in that case. All he would care about would be his rules.
 
We know that if God exists then he is the perfect or the most perfect being and so other people must be loved only for his sake while all our love is given to him. But it is a disgrace to do this though Christianity and Jesus accept and command it. It is very manipulative to make people's day by being nice to them when you are not doing it for them but for God.
 
God, by definition as the one wise creator and truly good being, has the right to tell us what to do. If we know God’s will and somebody lives in a wrong way we have to, in the name of God, order them to stop. It becomes our business when God can’t go to them himself. We won't have much self-esteem left if we do that. And if others act to stop us from sinning we will have even less.
 
Laughing at jokes is a sin if you should love God alone because it is giving yourself more pleasure in a thing than in him. Listening to love songs is a sin for the only songs should be about loving God. We wish the believers did practice what they preach so that they would turn everybody off their God.
 
The Bible says we must love other people because in doing so we love the Lord. Here is part of the Litany for the Holy Souls in Purgatory that was created by the Catholic Church. "Absolve O Lord the souls of the faithful departed from every bond of sin, and by the help of thy grace may they be enabled to escape the avenging judgement and to enjoy the happiness of eternal life...not for our consolation O Lord, not for their release from purgative pain, O God, but for thy joy and the greater honour of thy throne O Christ the King" (page 27, Catholic Voice, 30 October 2011). If saving you from suffering does not matter, then your self-esteem cannot matter. In fact it would be a hindrance to serving God.
 
The Church officially accepts the prayer of St Ignatius Loyola founder of the Jesuits.
 
“Lord, teach me to be generous. Teach me to love and serve you as you deserve. To give and not to count the cost, to fight and not to heed the wounds, to toil and not to seek for rest, to labour and to look for no reward save that of knowing that I do your holy will.”
 
LITANY OF HUMILITY
 
O Jesus! Meek and humble of heart hear me
From the desire of being esteemed,
From the desire of being loved,
From the desire of being extolled,
From the desire of being honoured,
From the desire of being praised,
From the desire of being preferred,
From the desire of being consulted,
From the desire of being approved,
Deliver me, Jesus,
From the fear of being humiliated,
From the fear of being despised,
From the fear of suffering rebukes,
From the fear of being calumniated,
From the fear of being forgotten,
From the fear of being ridiculed,
From the fear of being wronged,
From the fear of being suspected,
Deliver me, Jesus
That others may be more loved than I,
That others may be more esteemed than I,
That in the opinion of the world, others may increase, and I may decrease,
That others may be chosen and I set aside,
That others may be praised and I unnoticed,
That others may be preferred to me in everything,
That others become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should,
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
 
Imprimatur + James Mc Nulty, Bishop of Paterson, N.J.
 
From page 83, 84, New Colour Pieta, Divine Mercy Publications, Skerries, Co Dublin, 1994
 
Religion takes advantage of religious freedom to peddle nonsense that encourages those with low self-esteem to keep it low or get it lower. It wants to influence the confident person in the way of a religious addiction to self-torment for it wants to take that confidence away.

No Copyright