Pride

 

 

 

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According to my 1976 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, unabridged, the noun pride is defined this way: “the quality or state of being proud: as a (1) : inordinate self-esteem: an unreasonable conceit of superiority (as in talents, beauty, wealth, rank)  (2) usu cap: such pride personified as one of the deadly sins. b: a sense of one’s own worth and abhorrence for what is beneath or unworthy of oneself: lofty self-respect: a reasonable or justifiable feeling of one’s position . . .  c: a sense of delight or elation from some act or possession   2: proud or disdainful behavior or treatment: insolence or arrogance of demeanor haughty bearing: disdain . . . 3 a: inordinate show: ostentatious display: magnificence . . . showy decoration or adornment: magnificent or splendid ornamentation—used of a bird (as a peacock) in full display c: highest pitch: elevation reached: loftiness, prime (in the pride of one’s life) 4a: something of which one is proud or which excites pride: the best in a group or class: pick b obs: exalted position place such as may reasonably incite to pride   5a obs: a sense of power: fullness of animal spirits: mettle b: sexual desire: lust, heat—used chiefly of a female domestic animal cobs: wantonness, excess, extravagance, overboldness . . .”

 

 

My response: It seems that the Dictionary entries above coincide with the Jordan Peterson put down of pride as excessive self-regard or arrogant, ostentatious public display of personal superiority. These definitions could be generalized as an unreasonable, unjustifiable feeling of superiority, and it might be that one is putting oneself ahead of oneself, in a way that is affront to God.

 

I am a bit nervous about my immortal soul because it seems that my take that pride is the cardinal virtue flies in the face of Christian loathing and denunciation of pride as the cardinal sin. If I am wrong, I will burn, but I believe all the good deities are Individuators with much positive personal pride, so what I am proposing, has their approval and sanction—I hope and pray.

 

I believe that Jesus is God, so to be an egoist and stand for pride, self-interest, and individualism when pride and individualism seem to be regarded as satanic in the Bible does worry me. My views seem antithetical to Biblical concerns about personal pride as a rebuttal of God. But I also see the Age of Enlightenment celebration of reason individualism, science, democracy, capitalism, and self-interest, as the golden age of humanity in terms of worldly goodness, so far, with peace, plenty, freedom, and knowledge accessible to all. I think I am on the right track and that the Good Spirits have authorized me to speak out about positive pride and how it impacts people and biblical teaching on such matter. So sanctioned, I will continue my journey to blend egoism with traditional religions promoting humility, anti-humanism and altruism over pride, humanism, and egoism--but I am a religious humanist. I am seeking to reconcile these opposing forces and ideas and blend the old and the new and to seek truth.

 

 

It seems to me that Jordan Peterson is quite mistaken in his recent statements that pride is a Luciferian attribute paraded about like a chip on the shoulder by a sinner or brazen secular humanist competing with, defying and disobeying God.

 

 There is so much confusion about what this critically important noun means and implies, that  I do not think Peterson understands it at all. From a rational theistic or scientific Christian vantage point—or whatever he believes—his view of pride is wholly negative, off base and is in line with traditional Judeo-Christian mistaken theology that selfishness is evil, and selflessness is good, that humility is good, and pride is evil, and that such conclusions are consistent with biblical instruction. Jordan’s morality is more altruistic than egoistic and is consistent with and in line with classical Judeo-Christian morality which is altruistic-egoistic.

 

When the Church or Synagogue comes out against pride, it is coming out against individualism and the self-esteeming the self. When they elevate humility and low self-esteem to saintly status, they are favoring group-identifying as the ethical ideal.

 

I regard self-esteem, individualism, and egoist-individualist morality as good, and I label selflessness, low self-esteem, and its accompanying altruist-collectivist morality as evil. It should be patent to the reader that Christians, Jews, and Peterson are going to disagree with me severely on these issues.

 

To further complicate this divide, I am and claim to be a follower of Jesus, and there is considerable, overwhelming really—biblical evidence that the agrees with my opponents that pride is sinful, more than my point that without pride in oneself, or self-esteeming love of self all is forfeit, so goodness is unable to grow in this blighted, corrupt world.

 

By the end of this blog entry, I hope to reconcile the biblical altruist morality coupled with the concept of personal humility and my account of egoist morality and feeling and expressing proper if restrained pride. By taking some theological license and by suggesting that Jesus is an Individuator that could not reveal Himself as such to selfless, ignorant, barely conscious earthlings 2000 ago (They were not yet smart enough or strong enough to hear the full truth.) as other than their perfect Divine Shepherd and fellow human, a fellow joiner and groupist preaching selflessness and humility, because that is all that the group-living nonindividuators of that time could comprehend. He did not lie to them in any way, but he could not reveal the whole truth. God only tells us what we can handle, or, if we learn too much too fast, we are repulsed and become more stupid, regressive, and evil than we had to be at that time. Jesus knows it is not kind to reveal more than what someone can handle in their generation. He had to talk to them in terms that they understood so that they could slowly evolve through history and become virtuous and holy as they begin to maverize and individual-live a bit in the Modern era.

 

Jordan Peterson is a brilliant philosopher and psychologist but his analysis of the role of pride in human thinking and behaving is surprisingly crude, old-fashioned, and undeveloped.

 

I propose that haughty pride against God, what Jordan, the Jews, and the Christians rightly rail against does exist and is the deadliest sin against the good deities. This pride is group pride or negative pride, and all joiners humble themselves before their adopted groups, its elite, and its narrative, and in exchange as true believers in their mass movement, they are allowed to brag and strut, militantly arrogant and hostile blowhards yelling in defiance of God, mercy, and self-restraint. It is the humble, the collectivists that are the most proud, selfish, and sinful, but this is group pride and negative pride, and this is the pride that the followers of Satan and Lera, the Ultimate NonIndiviudators and Joiners exhibit and proclaim proudly and jubilantly.

 

Individual pride is positive pride, and it is affiliated with egoist morality and high self-esteem.

 

Group pride is fanatical and linked to excess self-esteem or arrogance and a complete lack of self-regard, a willingness to accept a life of slavery, lies, hate cruelty and needless suffering in the pack; one’s has no pride at all in enduring all that, and yet the willing slaves exhibit to each other and to the world a militant group pride, lying to themselves, each other and the world that they are perfect, and that their one true cause is the best, the most just that the world has ever seen and well worth dying for.

 

Jesus and the other good deities are not against good pride or positive pride, but they hate negative pride or group pride which is the pride of the satanic pack esteeming each other in rebellion against God, and that is the group and attitude that Jesus and the good deities abhor. It is these unrepentant sinners who will be humbled by angry good deities, and rewarded by the good deities will be the purveyors and possessors of positive pride--those individualists that worship the good deities shall be exalted.

 

Those evil people that resort to group pride are those that offend God grievously. Both their hubris and self-annihilating, masochistic nihilistic humility offend the good deities and anger them.

 

Jesus and the good deities are individualists of high self-esteem more than they are good joiners with modest self-esteem, but in their righteous, merited pride, they model how to act for proud, individuating followers: they conduct themselves with courtesy, modesty, and civility. The good deities and their angels never strut, brag, or imply that they are superior to anyone though they most obviously are, but they insist that all justifiably proud egoists conduct themselves with modesty and humility in interacting with others and in thought, speech, and action. God does not brag and will not suffer a braggart so even the practitioners of egoism and positive pride must be modest in behavior and speech, for boasting and putting on airs transmutes their positive pride into negative, group pride and that angers the gods and will not go unpunished.

 

 

Peterson, on one hand, use to espouse that the idea of the sovereign individual was the core belief of the West, which it is, and a fine axiom it is at that. But the sovereign individual must be proud of his accomplishments and esteem himself if he is to have self-confidence sufficient to motivate him to self-realize.

 

If I am correct, and I think I am, that God the Mother and Father, Individualists and Individuators both, model for humans how to be properly proud and properly humble. We are proud and humble as the Divine Couple demonstrate and exemplify, so I believe that proper human pride allows—even sanctioning and authorizing humans to practice egoist-individualist morality, the divine morality, so that they can live and maverize in the image of their Creators, who approve of proper human pride and proper human humility.

 

I will now describe and define my concepts of positive, individual pride versus negative, group pride, and I shall do it in light with how pride is defined in my dictionary.

 

According to my 1976 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, unabridged, the noun pride is defined this way: “the quality or state of being proud: as a (1) : inordinate self-esteem: an unreasonable conceit of superiority (as in talents, beauty, wealth, rank)  (2) usu cap: such pride personified as one of the deadly sins. b: a sense of one’s own worth and abhorrence for what is beneath or unworthy of oneself: lofty self-respect: a reasonable or justifiable feeling of one’s position . . .  c: a sense of delight or elation from some act or possession   2: proud or disdainful behavior or treatment: insolence or arrogance of demeanor haughty bearing: disdain . . . 3 a: inordinate show: ostentatious display: magnificence . . . showy decoration or adornment: magnificent or splendid ornamentation—used of a bird (as a peacock) in full display c: highest pitch: elevation reached: loftiness, prime (in the pride of one’s life) 4a: something of which one is proud or which excites pride: the best in a group or class: pick b obs: exalted position or place such as may reasonably incite to pride   5a obs: a sense of power: fullness of animal spirits: mettle b: sexual desire: lust, heat—used chiefly of a female domestic animal cobs: wantonness, excess, extravagance, overboldness . . .”

 

 

My response:

 

(1)   Inordinate self-self-esteem is an unreasonable self-conceit that is immoderate and immoderate self-regard of being disdainful of others or too self-deprecating are really opposite sides of the same coin of low self-esteem or self-loathing. If one esteems the self highly but not inordinately, nor does the self put the self down too much or beyond what is warranted for self-correction for sins, flaws and mistakes, then one is calm and at peace, but quite realistic about the self in terms of expectations for the self, and if one has lived up to moral self-expectations, then one can be proud of oneself, but must never strut or brag for that is unbecoming  period.

 

(4a) One feels proud of elevation reached, but that is whatever level of self-realized development one has reached.

 

 

 

B.

Here is a paragraph I pulled off the Internet (I could not tell its source.): “People also ask: How can we overcome pride. Humility and truth are the best antidotes to pride.”

 

My response: Truth is the best antidote anything, be it positive pride misconceived, or full-blown expression of negative pride. Truth is the best antidote to positive humility or individual humility that one is proud of what one has accomplished, but admits where one falls short, and never brags. Truth is the best antidote to negative humility or group humility where all in each group and in the whole society and at whatever level of the caste all debase citizens find themselves trapped, living lives in slavery and malevolence.

 

Humility is not much of an antidote to anything.

 

The entry: “Generosity and magnanimity are likewise beneficial in fighting and combatting the sin of pride.”

 

My response: This suggest that the selfless giver is humble so is saved from sin and death but that the self-interested Randian producer is selfish and condemned to burn for he is filled with anti-God pride. I disagree vigorously.

 

The entry: “The ultimate remedy to combat pride is love of God.”

 

My response: The ultimate remedy to combatting pridelessness (group pride or anti-Godfulness) is to maverize and be proud like proud individuating God, and that love of God will save the soul of the positively proud worshiper of the good deity.

 

The entry: “To love God is to love God for who He is. We cannot love God and embrace the sin of pride at the same time.”

 

My response: To love God is to love God for who He or She is. We cannot love God and embrace the sin of pridelessness at the same time.

 

 

 

C.

 

I copied out an article of the Internet, called THE SIN OF PRIDE in the Bible, by Adrian Rogers. This article is based on Pastor Adrian Roger’s message, The Problem with Pride.

 

I will quote the article in full and comment where I deem appropriate.

 

Pastor: “Pride is a problem that all wrestle with—and those who think they don’t probably have more of it. ‘Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before the fall.’

 

What Pride Is Not

 

Sinful Pride is Not the Same as Good Self-Image.”

 

My response: I agree that sinful pride is not the same as good self-image.

 

Pastor: “In Jesus, you are somebody. The Bible describes Christians as the righteousness of God in Christ . . .”

 

My response: You as an individual have worth and are somebody on your own, if you are moral and holy, individuating, but you are all that much more so in Jesus or the other good deities. I love the concept that Christians are the righteousness of God in Christ.

 

Pastor: “When Jesus washed His disciples feet (    ,  ), that was humility. Jesus was not thinking lowly of Himself. He knew that he came from God. But knowing that, He washed His disciples’ feet.”

 

My response: There is a place for positive humility even if the life of an egoist individuators and some service to others is expected and obligatory.

 

Pastor: “Humility is not thinking lowly of yourself. It is not thinking of yourself at all.”

 

My response: One should always be aware of the self and how one is reacting and should react in any moment, during any encounter with people, life, or reality. If one must be humble, fine, but one should not need to feel lowly about oneself, and rarely should we not think of ourselves at all, forthat sins against the axiom that the individual is the sovereign concept not just of this world and the West, but in heaven too.

 

Pastor: “Sinful Pride is Not the Same as Taking Pride in Your Work

 

When we say someone ’takes pride in his work,’ that’s not the kind of pride we are warning about. When a job is well done and you get recognition, or when a parent is grateful for the grades a child makes, that is not sinful pride.”

 

My response: Even the Pastor recognizes that there are sources of positive pride that are not sinful pride; I would go farther and argue that without a sense of pride, one can be immoral and still live with oneself, but a morally proud individual, cannot for long tolerate himself, unless he tries really tries to be moral most of the time, coming close in action to living in accordance with his own standard of behavior, a gauge that he insist that the self-live up to. He is proud so he must be moral, or his guilt and shame will eat him alive.

 

Pastor: “What Is the Sin of Pride?

 

An Attitude of Independence From God

 

Pride is an attitude of, ‘I don’t need you, God. Stay out of my life.’”

 

My response: For me the sin of pride is sin of pridelessness where the individual leans to heavily on God and remains too dependent on God when she should be maverizing and running her own affairs, even running a part of God’s kingdom on earth. Positive pride between the individuator and the individuating and individuated good deity is not the statement that I do not need you, God if mostly I run my own affairs. God/gods: stay out of my life. Rather, I will not interfere with your divine administrations by interrupting you needlessly. I need you. I always did and always will, but I’d not seek to bother you any more than necessary. Please stay in my life but I will run my life on my own as long as I can as well as I can, and I will contact you just to enjoy each other’s company as well as when I am stuck.

 

Pastor: “You might say, ‘I don’t have that.’ Question: do you pray regularly? “Well,’ you say, ‘I don’t pray as much as I ought to.’

 

You don’t pray because you don’t feel the need to. You think, ‘I can handle it.’ If you are wrestling with prayerlessness, you are really wrestling with pride.”

 

My response: I think the Pastor is correct; we should pray a lot but not all the time; God wants us to live our own lives too. If we are wrestling with prayerlessness, it is more likely that we are wrestling with pridelessness than with pride, and that we are not religious or may be worshiping a demon actively and consciously, and the demon the joiner is without proper pride.

 

Pastor: “Ungratefulness to God

 

Paul asked this penetrating question: ‘What do you have that you did not receive? (See ‘I worked for it,’ you say. Who gave you the ingenuity, the strength, the energy? You don’t have one blessed thing that you have not received.”

 

My response: In a way, Paul and the Pastor are correct—all that we have and received come from God, and that is as it should be. But, to some degree the individual, through her self-realizing and hard work, is self-generating a bit too, and that personal input is original, personal, and significant, and God praises us for being somewhat self-reliant and demands that we make something of the gifts given us by De.

 

Pastor: “Thinking You are Better Than Others

 

Here are some indicators of pride.

 

A proud person . . .

·      Will not admit mistakes, and becomes irritated when corrected for mistakes.

·      Accepts praise for gifts over which they have no control: beauty, talent, etc.

·      Refuses to take counsel and learn from others.

 

C.S. Lewis wrote, ‘Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.’ (C.S. Lewis; Mere Christianity)”

 

My response: We all mistakes and one cannot know or love God or self-improve unless one is brutally self-honest, welcoming input from all sources about the self, blemishes, and all. The self is not proud unless the self is so secure that no criticism is unwelcome, and he fully realizes that beauty, talent and being born with a silver spoon in no way exempts the privileged from their divine duty to self-realize like the less talented and less fortunate.

 

Pastor: “Here are five ways pride devastates your life.

 

Pride Defies God

 

The Book of Proverbs provides wonderful lessons on the sin of pride. ‘These six things the LORD hates, yes, seven are an abomination to Him; a proud look . . .’ (   ) Seven things God hates, and number one is pride. ‘Everyone proud in heart is an abomination to the LORD (_____).

 

Why does God hate pride so much? Pride created the devil. Pride turned Lucifer, the son of the morning, into Satan, the father of night. Among Paul’s standard for a preacher was that he must be ‘not a novice, lest being puffed up with pride he fall into the same condemnation as the devil.’ (   )

 

Pride ruined humanity. In the Garden of Eden, do you think temptation was to taste a particular kind of fruit? No—the temptation was, ‘You will be like God.’ (See    )

 

‘God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.’ (    ) God lines Himself up in battle against the proud.”

 

My response: One should always be humble towards any good deity because they are superior to us always and are our bosses. At the same time, it is ordered by them of us that we strive mightily to be like them and in some small way as individuating creators to become and do as they do. The pride of individualism is to become like God and act like God as an admiring subordinate seeking to emulate the ways of Divine Perfection. The negative Pride of Lucifer is the pridelessness or group pride to fight God, compete with God and overthrow God with the new world order based in nonindividuating, self-loathing and altruism rather than blessed individuating, self-respect, and egoism.

 

Pastor: “Pride Ruins the Heart

 

The seat of pride is the heart.

 

‘A haughty look, a proud heart, and the plowing of the wicked are sin (    ). That is, a man who plows his field without giving God thanks for sun, rain, and germination is proud. He is self-sufficient.”

 

My response: Again, the good deities, individuators all, do not want us to be ungrateful; we should always be grateful and give thanks. We should be more independent than not and more self-sufficient than not.

 

Pastor: “We were born with pride and selfishness in the heart. ‘For, from within, out of the heart of men, proceed all evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewedness, and evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness’ (    ). These things are not learned; they are part of human nature.”

 

My response: Yes, the evil in the human heart is not learned but is part of our human natures. We were born with the pride of pridelessness and selflessness as the dominant and wicked proportion of our hearts, and to improve morally and spiritually, over time we maverize, taking on the godly pride of reasonable, merited self-regard and enlightened self-interest.

 

 

Pastor: “Pride Divides Society

 

There has never been an argument, war, divorce, or church split in which pride was not a major factor.

 

‘By pride comes nothing but strife’ (   )

 

‘He who is of a proud heart stirs up strife’ (     )

 

If God resists the proud, then the proud man is out of fellowship with God. Any man, woman or child who is out of fellowship with God will also be  out of fellowship with other people.”

 

My response: God resists not the proud but the arrogant prideless that sin. God the Individualist is out of fellowship with a sinful joiner, so the sinful joiner will be out of fellowship with the individualist, the living angel that individually lives, and he will be out of fellowship with all joiners, and they will share the fellowship of insider groupism with their tribal -fellow-belongers, while sharing the fellowship of groupist pridelessness against individuals outside their group and against other tribal rivals with whom they conflict and war incessantly.

 

Pastor: “Often, we are not trying to solve the problem—we are trying to win the argument. That is pride. You might be right and still the problem because of your attitude.”

 

My response: Yes, conflicts are escalated and perpetuated by those that seek victory rather than peace, solving problems for mutual benefit. But that kind of arrogant pride usually is affiliated with tribal warring, on whatever level, and it is group pride, not individual pride.

 

Pastor: “Pride Brings Dishonor

 

What does the proud person want? Praise, honor, esteem. What does he get through pride? ‘When pride comes, then comes shame’ (  )”

 

My response: Yes, external praise, honors and the esteem of others is gratifying, but the individualist practices good pride and good humility when he is satisfied and contented with how he praises himself or humbles himself as in need of self-correction. Group pride or bad requires seeks public praising and avoidance of public shaming.

 

Pastor: “The fear of the LORD is the instruction of wisdom, and before honor is humility (   ). Humility, not pride, comes before honor. ‘A man’s pride will bring him low, but the humble in spirit will retain honor.”

 

My response: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but before the human is honored by God, he must display his positive pride more than he displays his positive humility, before God and in his private thoughts, as a maverizer.

 

A man’s humility, especially his negative or group humility, will bring him low, but the justly and proportionately proud in spirit will retain divine honor.

 

Pastor: “The proud man wants to be praised, petted, honored. The very thing he wants, he loses the admiration of others. He ends up not with admiration, but contempt.”

 

My response: Note the sinfully proud man seeking to be praised, petted, and honored is a social creature. His pride is connected to his sadistic snubbing of other of inferior social rank. Social creatures, by Mavellonialist definition, lack self-esteem or proper pride and proper humility—their entire self-assessment is a communal appraisal, a communal affirmation or disaffirmation.

 

Pastor: “Pride Destroys Souls

 

Pride populates Hell. ‘The Lord will destroy the house of the proud’ (    ) Pride is the road to national ruin.

 

But God says, ‘If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn away from their wicked ways, then I will hear them from Heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.’ “

 

My response: This is an accurate statement of the covenant established and honored by Yahweh in the Old Testament with the Hebrew people. Always, we should be humble in the presence of God, out of respect and affection, as well as fear. If we are wise and smart, we realize how perfect, how brilliant and beyond us, God is.

 

Note that a proud, rebellious people continue to sin and defy God and will not turn from their wicked ways, but still, I assert that bad pride and bad humility are groupist traits and behaviors arising out of altruist-collectivist morality. That grows out of worshiping evil spirits.

 

Pastor: “Some of you are in financial ruin. Why? Because your neighbors keep buying things you can’t afford—and you think you have to keep up.”

 

My response: Not that this proud, foolish materialist, keeping up with the Jones, is a group creature, wrecking his life based upon false worries about what his neighbors do or think.

 

Pastor: “A proud person’s emotions will be thin, because you are controlled by circumstances. The right car, the right clothes, the right decorations—emotionally, it will get to you.

 

But pride is primarily eternal spiritual ruin.”

 

My response: Yes, group pride will lead to eternal death and hellfire.

 

Pastor: “ ‘The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, ‘God, I thank You that I am not like other men—extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all I possess.’ And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to Heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner.’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

 

My response: Jesus seems clearly to be condemning the proud, egotistical, bragging, individualistic Pharisee as self-exalting but due be humbled by God in this world and in the next. Jesus seems to be explicitly declaring that the humble, self-deprecating, remorseful tax collector with his head down while asking divine forgiveness and mercy is the one that God will exalt perhaps in this world, but most certainly in the next.”

 

I have a difficult time reconciling my beliefs and definitions of positive pride and positive humility as egoist ethical accomplishments with biblical condemnation of pride as the cardinal sin, but I maintain my beliefs while suggesting that the arrogant Pharisee is guilty of groupist pride, and the tax collector is somehow the avatar of healthy pride and healthy humility. The Pharisee will be punished by God and the tax collector will be rewarded.

 

Pastor: “Jesus’ Example of Humility

 

Jesus showed us that the way up is down”

 

My response: It may be that Jesus seems to be showing us that the way up to heaven is down to self-deprecation, but, in fact, Jesus is showing us that the way up is by going up into temperate, healthy, reasonable self-appreciation and self-promotion.

 

Pastor: “ ‘ Let this be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men . . . Therefore God also had highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow . . .’

 

God is going to give to His saints, who follow Christ in genuine humility, a greater position than Satan had before he fell. The Bible says that we will judge angels (see     )—and

 

List of Scriptures Referenced in this Article

 

More Biblical Verses About the Sin of Pride

 

‘If you walk in my statutes and keep My commandments, and perform them, then I will give you rain in its season, the land shall yield its produce, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit . . . And, after all this, if you do not obey Me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sins. I will break the pride of your power; I will make your heavens like iron and your earth like bronze.’ “

 

My response: Humans do not live in an ontological vacuums as mere intelligent, evolutionary apes. We have the intelligence of smart creatures so conscious and language-wielding that we have free will, a gift and burden give us by God. The wages of virtue are divine reward in this world and the next; the wages of sin and rebellion against God are death and misery in this world and in the next.

 

Pastor: “ ‘There they cry out, but He does not answer, because of the pride of evil men. Surely God will not listen to empty talk, nor will the Almighty regard it.’

 

‘For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world.”

 

My response: It is no wonder that Christians are lost and confused. They have been told and egoist morality, individualism and self-esteem are examples of Luciferian pride on display, and that they will burn if they do not surrender themselves abjectly to God right now.

 

Now, humans, who are wild animals at heart, filled with lust and the primitive but powerful drive to survive and perpetuate this species, are to renounce totally the ways of this world, and be purely otherworldly like God is. These demands seem excessive, unreasonable, and unachievable for most people.

 

If I am correct, and I think I am the egoist morality is good, and that the ontological law of moderation is the law of the universe, the extreme Christian theology against individual pride and love of being in the world are legitimate criticisms that are too harsh and go to0 far.

 

We must not forget what the Bible teaches, but the Mavellonialist touch is required to bring Christianity and Judaism into the 21^st century.

 

 

 

 

D.

 

Here is an excellent, authoritative article by Thomas A. Tarrants on pride and humility. He is the President Emeritus of the C.S. Lewis institute. I will quote it in full and then comment on it.

 

T (for Thomas Tarrants): “Pride and Humility, By Thomas A. Tarrants on December 4, 2011.

 

 

                                                           

                                                     Pride and Humility

 

‘Pride is your greatest enemy, humility is your greatest friend.”

 

My response: Group pride and group humility are one’s greatest enemies and this is the arrogant pride railed against in the Bible; individual pride and individual humility are one’s greatest friends, and these meet usually with God’s approval and reward.

 

T: “So said the late John R. W. Scott, a remarkably humble man of great abilities and accomplishments who is often said to have made the greatest impact for Christ of anyone in the twentieth century. His succinct statement about pride and humility goes straight to the heart of what the Bible teaches about the deadly root of our sins and sorrows.

 

How many recent sermons have you heard on pride or humility? Probably not many. One hears surprisingly little from church or parachurch leaders about either of these subjects. In fact, what throughout history has been recognized as the deadliest of vices is now almost celebrated as a virtue in our culture. Pride and arrogance are conspicuous among the rich, the powerful, the successful, the famous and celebrities of all sorts, and even some religious leaders.”

 

My response: Thomas is correct that the modern world has moved away from God and the worldly, connected, and successful are very proud and self-aggrandizing. My observation is that these swaggers are not selfish individualists but are selfish joiners, and groupists, purely and practitioners of sophisticated altruist-collectivist morality.

 

T: “And it is also alive and well in ordinary people, including each of us. Yet few of us realize how dangerous it is to our souls and greatly it hinders our intimacy with God and love for others. Humility, on the other hand, is often seen as weakness, and few of us know much about it or pursue it. For the good of our souls, then, we need to gain a clearer understanding of pride and humility to for the one and embrace the other.”

 

My response: Thomas could teach today’s believers much of what has been forgotten. We need to forsake bad pride and bad humility and embrace good pride and good humility. He and Jordan Peterson likely think alike about pride and humility.

 

T: “Pride

 

C.S. Lewis, another top contender for having had the greatest impact for Christ in the twentieth century, called pride ‘the great sin.’ Ever believer should read his chapter by the title in Mere Christianity.

 

There Lewis said, According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil:”

 

My response: Jordan Peterson may not be able to openly announce Christ as his savior, but he seems to have agreed now completely with Lewis and Christians that individualist, hubristic Pride is what led to the fall of Lucifer, and all humans that follow in Lucifer’s steps.

 

T: “Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind . . . it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began. 1

 

If this sounds like exaggeration, it will help us to know that Lewis is not simply giving us his private opinion but summarizing the thinking of the great saints through the ages.

 

Augustine and Aquinas both taught that pride was the root of sin.2  Likewise, Calvin, Luther, and many others. Make no mistake about it: pride is the great sin. It’s the devil’s most effective and destructive tool.”

 

My response: I am thinking of a snippet of video I looked at two weeks ago from Jordan Peterson, warning against intellectual pride as Luciferian pride. Peterson considers geniuses like himself with high IQs to be the only ones capable of first-rate creativity and intellectual originality. He insists that talent is rare.

 

As a common man and blue-collar worker, I deny this: anyone with any level of IQ is capable of first-rate creativity, of intellectual originality and certainly all are capable of emotional genius, which can inspire and shape the topic and slant of one’s creative outputs. I suspect that if all were to maverize deeply, it will unleash hidden, under-utilized intelligent areas of our brains, so that all should be able to increase and unleash their pockets of inner intelligence in new and interesting ways.

 

Returning to Peterson’s video, he sternly warned those that are intellectually gifted that they had better worry about—in essence—going to hell if they are not humble. He warns that the gifted are the most likely to burn because they are most susceptible to being proud of their unearned, innate gifts, and intellectual pride is the worst form of pride and sinning, and it is pure Luciferian pride.

 

It is obvious that I reject all of this.

 

Satan’s intellectual pride is the pride of a guru at the head of his mass movement, and it is group pride and that is pure self-detestation, a complete humiliation of the self, and that is pure evil. Lucifer’s sin is his anti-intellectual pride, and his sin of self-immolation rejecting God’s command for all being to love themselves and maverize, and, Lucifer, the altruistic leader of the pack, rebels against God’s will and instructions for all sentient beings.

 

T: “Why do great spiritual leaders, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant alike, unite around this conviction? Because it is so clearly and solidly taught in Scripture.”

 

My response: Tarrants is right that Scripture teaches that intellectual, individualistic pride and self-interest are cardinal sins. I reject almost all of that as an egoist and living-angel-in-the-making—trying not always succeeding—and I do not want to contradict the Bible or Jesus, though I disagree with the Biblical take on pride and humility. My only justification is that I love Jesus and all the great classical good deities, and they could only communicate to the primitive worldview of the people back in history in terms their understood—in altruistic-collectivistic understanding in place at that time.

 

Today, we will set the record straight and do not wish to criticize or condemn Scripture, Christ or any good deity from ancient day. I think they agree with me, and indeed sent me to people as a prophet to help usher better times, so we do not come to overthrow older faiths and moralities (These were advancing improvements at the time.) but to complement them where we can, and blend it all together. I seek not to overthrow or war against any great traditional faith or their holy books, but to work together to build upon what they constructed to help people move forth successfully in history.

 

T: “Pride first appears in the Bible in Genesis 3, where we see the devil, that ‘proud spirit’ as John Donne described him, using pride as the avenue by which to seduce our first parents. Taking the form of a serpent, his approach was simple but deadly. First, he arrogantly contradicted what God had said to Eve about eating the forbidden fruit and charged God with lying.”

 

My response: Note that Lucifer appears to Eve as a serpent, so he represents chaos or evil nature or the out-of-balance feminine, to lure her (our first human mother already had a basically evil nature, I think, and free will so she was capable of choosing to sin, and I think Yahweh know Adam and Eve would sin sooner or later, and be tossed out into the world.). Eve, in her state of grace and pure moral and spiritual goodness, is capable of sinning but has not yet sinned. As she was in the Garden, she represents cosmos at its best, a garden or urban spot, unnatural and lovely, and those residing there are cosmos in balance (Cosmos or Yang out of balance is sinning.).

 

Satan accuses God of lying, and this introduces lying into the world because God cannot lie and will not lie, but Satan, being pure falsehood and mendacity, relies on lying so Sa can twist the fabric of reality to gain power and thwart God. Once the world of the lie is introduced to Adam and Eve, it gives them an evil alternative to pure, good but one-dimensional living in the Garden of Eden as perfect if innocent human beings.

 

T: “This shocking rejection of God’s word introduced Eve to the hitherto unknown possibility of unbelief and was intended to arouse doubt in her mind about the truthfulness and reliability of God. In the next breath, the devil drew her deeper into deception by contending that God’s reason for lying was to keep her from enjoying all the possibilities inherent in being Godlike. This clever ploy was aimed at undermining her confidence in the goodness and love of God and arousing the desire to become like God.”

 

My response: Women are more selfless than men and are of innately lower self-esteem then men, so they are most easily corrupted than men—not by much maybe by 5 or 10%--so note the archetypal axiom conveyed in ancient Scripture that women are more evil than men, that evil entered into the world women because Satan knew working on Eve would be his best approach to weaning them away from God. In fairness to Eve, and all women, men are more evil in action because their violence, abuse of others and warring makes natural evil in the world much worse. Men actively inflict pain upon others and themselves.

 

It occurs to me that Satan hijacked Christianity and about every other religion, both ancient and modern denominations, by spreading the lie that God was a jealous Ego lying to humans to protect His monopoly on power. Satan smears God, with the colossal falsehood that God really wants to keep humans down and back so that only He can remain ascendant as He selfishly keeps all the power and enjoyment of God-like experiences for Himself and a few of His angels, and humans are kept naked, shackled and innocent in the Garden of Eden. Satan defames God and egoist religion by suggesting that humans should be selfish and seek to eat the forbidden fruit so they too can become knowing, conscious, and powerful like God and then to rival Yahweh rather than serve Him.

 

Satan slanders God and egoism-individualism as demonic, and favors Saself as noble and offering people a way out of bondage and repression, and he offers morally crippling altruism-collectivism and this cult of humility (which only increases each personal and natural low sense of low self-esteem, thereby increasing hatred in self and against the world so now each person, through her action and inaction, is growing evil in the world.

 

Humans do not learn the truth about pride and egoism as good and humility and altruism as evil, because humans are so primitive biologically and culturally that they cannot do even incremental moral improvement unless quite slowly over centuries and thousands of years, or they will resort to jungle immorality.

 

Add in Satan’s lying about the nature of morality and immorality, then it is no wonder that the great Christian thinks got it badly wrong about egoism and pride. God would not interfere and tell people about egoism and pride because He did not want to steal their discovery of ultimate truth on their own. In doing so God did not lie to them but he did not interfere much in the world on Earth, allowing Satan to successfully lie to people about pride and egoism, for humans had to discover how to live and what is true in their own good time, even if they wiped each other out before finally understanding the natures of pride and egoism.

 

Add to this that humans live in near complete ignorance about ultimate truth, and it is no wonder no one can separate what is true and actual from what is false and illusory.

 

T: “The desire to lift up and exalt ourselves beyond our place as God’s creature lies at the heart of pride. As Eve in her now confused and deceived state of mind considered the possibilities, her desire to become Godlike became stronger. She began to look at the forbidden fruit in a new light, as something attractive to the eyes and pleasant to the touch. Desire increased, giving rise to rationalization and a corresponding erosion of the will to resist and say no.”

 

My response: God desires and commands us each day to lift up, and exalt ourselves beyond our place as individuators, to live as Individuators as God is, because we are His creatures, made in image and likeness. God commands us each day to be mediocrities no longer, to exist as no longer nonindividuated as groupist joiners in our negative humility and selfless hatred of others and ourselves. This self-loathing is the hidden message that Satan was sends behind his altruist morality and fake humility, steering all towards in ancient times and today.

 

T: “Finally, weakened by unbelief, enticed by pride, and ensnared by self-deception, she opted for autonomy and disobeyed God’s command. In just a few deft moves, the devil was able to use pride to bring about Eve’s downfall and plunge the human race into spiritual ruin. This ancient but all-to-familiar process confronts each of us daily: ‘Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is full grown brings for death’ (James 1:14-15).’ “

 

My response: I accept that the urge to sin and giving into sin is when one is weakened by unbelief and ensnared by self-deception, and by disobeying God’s command, but to desire good pride and autonomy or self-reliance and self-sufficiency are virtues that God insists that we hone and build upon to individuate in De’s name. It is the humble who self-deprecate, nonindividuated and run with the pack, that, lacking self-pride, find worth desperately sought after in group-pride or negative pride, and that is the altruistic, immoral pride that Peterson and Christians rail against, but mistake that it is aligned with individualism and merited self-pride.

 

It could be that the original sin was to disobey God’s will and instructions, but to become, mortal, naked conscious humans who know they are basically evil but have free will to fight it and learn to self-realize, work, love and serve God is really a blessing more than a curse, so why should humans be punished for wanting to not be Pinocchio’s, mere puppets in the garden with no real consciousness or challenges? God is conscious and has free will and De loves us, and De would want us to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. To eat the fruit to me seems like something to be rewarded not punished, and to have knowledge of good and evil like God the angels and other sentient beings have is to become a sentient being, and that is an irreversible blessing and curse—more blessing than curse—accompanied by moral and spiritual consequences and being responsible for one fate in life and after death.

 

T: “From this point on in the Bible, we see the outworking of pride and unbelief in the affairs of individuals, families, nations, and cultures. As people lose or suppress the knowledge of God, spiritual darkness grows and a psychological inversion occurs: in their thinking God becomes smaller and they come larger. The center of gravity in their mental lives shifts from God to themselves. They become the center of the world, and God is conveniently oved to the periphery, either through denial of his existence or distortion of his character. Self-importance and godless self-confidence grow stronger. The cycle that follows is familiar: people exalt themselves against God and over others. Pride increases, arrogant and/or abusive behavior ensues, and people suffer.”

 

My response: I agree that prideful rebellion and unbelief can lead people away from God, but when a sinner rebels against God, she embraces conformity to Satan, who is the leader of the pack, favoring altruist morality, low self-esteem, and fake humility.

 

 

I also wish to reassure that reader that I do not think that a human, any human, should ever disrespect and act haughty towards any good deity, whether major or minor in status. Such hostile attitude and behavior towards a good deity surely will anger her or him and that will not end well for the snotty human insulting these divine leaders of the world.

 

I also think that no human, ever, should be arrogant towards anyone, because the lack of modesty is bad manners, and that violates the Golden Rule, be one an egoist or altruist.

 

Arrogance and positive pride are not synonymous. When someone acts supercilious, no matter his words, his actions exhibit someone that does not like himself or have confidence in himself. If one is a virtuous and holy individuator, one speaks with politeness, low-key quiet confidence, and that manner of interacting with others is a behavioral instantiation of how he feels inside. He is proud without being cocky or arrogant, and he treats others as equals without making a masochistic fetish out of fake humility in front of others to manipulate them for gain.

 

T: “On a national level, this is writ large in the history of Israel and surrounding nations, especially in the indictments delivered by the prophets of the eight and seven centuries BC. Blinded by power and the unprecedented affluence of the eighth century, prideful leaders of Israel embraced a corrupted view of God, trusted in their own wisdom and power, oppressed their own people, ignored his call to repent, and thereby invited his judgment, which fell with disastrous results.”

 

My response: Thomas Tarrants has some strong, valid criticisms of prideful humans, and his warnings about these self-exalting buffoons that snub, defy, disobey, and turn their backs on their good deities. Worldly success and access rendered them immortal and invincible in their own eyes, and they forgot that their blessing came from their benevolent god or gods. These ruling elites of various generations and countries in history snubbed God, oppressed their own people, ignored Yahweh’s call for them to repent, and thereby invited his judgment with disastrous results.

 

I accept all of this and accept it as historically and theologically accurate. We should work with and obey the good deities and offer them gifts and celebrate them ritually out of desire and love, but also out of fear of what will happen to us if we fail to appreciate and worship them.

 

Tarrants condemning their prideful sinning was justified, but he is misidentifying bad, group, collectivist pride of ruling elites with good, individual pride; he is painting with too broad a brush, insisting that all pride is vicious.

 

T: “There are also many biblical examples of pride and its consequences in the lives of individuals and they offer valuable lessons for our lives.”

 

My response: Thomas accuses individuals of individual sinful pride that they will be punished for, but I object, that their individually expressed sinful pride is group pride, because they group-live, group-identify, nonindividuated, group-conform, and practice altruist morality, and these orientations feed their collective, sinful pride. Sinful pride can be individualistic and so can be bad humility, but group humility and group pride can be good, but, ordinarily, the kind of sinful pride that these Old Testament prophets are enraged over is group pride, and the kind of sinful humility that goes with that sinful group pride is sinful group humility.

 

T: “Often their stories are self-contained in one chapter and make for easy reading. One of the most notable examples from the Old Testament is that of Uzziah, who was a believer. When he became king of Judea at age sixteen, he set his heart to seek God and put himself under the spiritual mentorship of Zechariah. And ‘as long as he sought the Lord, God made him prosper’ (2 Chron. 26:5). As a result, he acquired wealth and also became politically and militarily powerful. Then things changed. ‘His fame spread far, for he was marvelously helped, till he was strong. But when he was strong, he grew proud, to his destruction.’ (26:15-16).”

 

My response: The Christian warning against sinful pride, which Tarrants labels as individualistic, is shown here—in crystal clear terms--to lead to the downfall of young Uzziah, once and early humble, eager, deferential to Yahweh and willing to receive instruction from Yahweh’s prophet Zechariah, now older, and swelled up with conceit, once power, fame, money, and worldly position corrupted his heart. He exalted himself, at God’s expense, so God humbled him. I get the message, and I agree that those guilty of sinful pride are humbled by God, sometimes in this world, and for sure in the next should they remain unrepentant when they die. Again, the sinful pride and complementary sinful humility operating in the same puffed-up heart, is a group phenomenon more than it is an individual phenomenon, though it is expressed when the individual is alone, or working in a group setting.

 

I would counter under egoist-individualist morality that the justly proud and justly humble individuators that worships God would be most likely to be arrogant and rebellious when he is weak, and once, as a developed adult, creative, brilliant, successful (whether the world acknowledges it or not), prosperous and with many independent objects of originality and brilliance as examples of his talent (perhaps he is an inventor).

 

Once he is strong, able, accomplished, he will be proud of his victories, but he will not take himself too seriously and he realizes that the gods have been very kind to him, and he is privileged. He is strong and accomplished now, brilliant even in demonstrable objects produced by him, but that makes him humble or at least at peace; he is quietly confident, skilled, competent, and able, so he feels no need to strut, boast, to show off to receive praise from other people, demanding that they bend a knee to him in sycophantic worship. Real success and real power are his, and ordinarily that makes him neither too humble nor too proud. He loves himself an  is at peace himself, and he knows and loves the good deities, and they do not strut and brag—they hate that, nor do they depreciate themselves, allowing themselves or anyone to put them down, nor do they brag in public which is a sadistic attack to assert that oneself is ascendant and superior to one’s neighbors—that is all altruistic group behavior and social ladder power struggling—none of that is based in self-love, and but is an overcompensation for self-loathing, and these social games are cover for that self-contempt and mutual contempt.

 

Tarrants above quotes the Bible that Uzziah has success in the world as long as he is humble, virtuous and holy, following and loving Yahweh, and that he is humbled and destroyed by Yahweh in this world as soon as he converts his will and attention to be arrogant, vicious and unholy. I agree with Tarrants that Yahweh did punish his king. Remember he is king of a small nation the top of a collection of a million people, and that centralized position of power is corrupt, so sinful pride in the king growing as he ages and gets more worldly victory is almost inevitable though still punishable.

 

I want to add a correction to Tarrants which he may have agreed with if he thought of it too. When the rebel against a good deity is filled with contempt for God and sinful pride, that person will be punished in this world and for sure in the next, but he may remain at the top of the social riches and power heap as long as he lives, and he may be on top for years. Putin the devil in Russia is very rich and very powerful and has stayed at the top of the heap for decades, though he likely is not a very happy person, and he is suffering in a weird way, though it looks like he has his worldly rewards and triumphs, and perhaps that comes from Satan rewarding his chief sinners.

 

It is not always obvious to an onlooker that a sinner proud and unrepentant is punished in this world, and that the humble, do-gooder does not lose out in this world, but the sinner is very unhappy inside so suffers that way, and the do-gooder is filled with an optimism, a beauty and inner happiness, though his life on earth is hell. Reality or what is actually going on in someone’s life is hard to detect from the outside.

 

I also wanted to add that the wise Dennis Prager warns that the rarest virtue is courage. To have moral courage is to fight overt evil openly and publicly in the community, no matter the personal cost. The other day Prager noted that many kind, gentle people have no courage to fight evil in their generation, so they are not as good as they could be and should be.

 

I argue that we must teach the young to love God and themselves and other, and to self-realize and maverize with a lifelong consistency of focus and energy investment. To go against one’s family, peers and community and live as an individuating supercitizen will give the young that most precious moral gift—most of them anyway—moral courage, and they will be able to fight evil in their generation with impressive majorities of citizens, and these soldiers of God are not falsely humble, nor are they boastful, but they are fearless, reasonably powerfully feeling proud, and yet humble and calm—not needing cheap noise and theatrics and superficial worldly affirmation—to know their real worth.

 

Only egoism-individualism and good pride will make the people courageous, and then the devil on earth can finally be defeated, and only then will the kingdom of God on earth be established.

 

T: “What happened? There are hints in the text that at some point on the road to the top, he stopped seeking the Lord and the spiritual mentoring of Zechariah.”

 

My response: Tarrants provides direct proof here that arrogance as sinful pride is group pride. The person is naturally, psychologically very insecure, and self-doubting if the first time he is rewarded with worldly success, that he is so confidence-deficit that he can only feel good about himself by rejecting allegiance to God and his prophet to demonstrate that his rise was all his own doing.

 

An individualist with real, healthy pride, would be realistic enough and secure enough in his personhood to assume partial credit for his rise in the world, without failing to acknowledge his huge debt to God and Zechariah, his benefactors.

 

T: “This suggests a lessening dependence on God and a growing dependence upon himself and his own strength and wisdom. History shows at every point how easy it is for pride to increase as we become stronger, more successful, more prosperous, and more recognized in our endeavors. In fact, anything real or imagined, that elevates us above others can be a platform for pride. Ironically, this is true even when these things come as a result of God’s blessings.

 

As a result of all of his blessings, Uzziah, rather than humbling himself in thanksgiving to God, began to think more highly of himself than he should have and developed an exaggerated sense of his own importance and abilities. This pride of heart led to the presumption before God and brought very serious consequences upon him, illustrating the biblical warnings that pride leads to disgrace (Prov. 11:2) and that ‘pride goes before destruction’ (Prov. 16:18) I encourage you to read and meditate on Uzziah’s full story in 2 Chronicles 26. The stories of Haman (Esther 3-7) and Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 4) also offer valuable insights into pride and are well worth reading.

 

This is evident today in the dangerous pride in some political and business leaders in the West. We have only to look around us at the current state of political life in America to see examples. Pride and arrogance are obvious in many political leaders, whether liberal or conservative, making matters much worse than they need to be. Or consider the business and financial catastrophes we have experienced in recent years. A thoughtful article in the Wall Street Journal after the WorldCom and Enron debacles attributed them to ‘pride, greed and lack of accountability.’ The recent financial crisis in America is yet another example of the same thing. Clearly pride is very dangerous and can produce widespread suffering in society when people in leadership and power are corrupted by it.

 

Pride also affects religious people. Few people today seem to be aware of the danger of spiritual pride, but spiritual leaders throughout the history of the church have always seen it as a great plague and tool of the devil. Even in times of revival, it is a danger. Commenting on the revival in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1737, Johnathan Edwards said: ‘The first and worst cause of errors that abound in our day and age is spiritual pride. This is the main door by which the devil comes into the heart of those who are zealous for the advancement of Christ. It is the chief inlet of smoke from the bottomless pit to darken the mind and mislead the judgment. Pride is the main handle by which he has hold of Christian persons and the chief source of all the mischief that he introduces to clog and hinder a work of God. Spiritual pride is the main spring or at least the main support of all other errors. Until this disease is cured, medicines are applied in vain to heal all other diseases.3’ “

 

My response: Tarrants has convinced me that Protestants and Catholics alike identify pride as the cardinal sin, and that both secular and religious leaders were and are guilty of harboring such hubris. Again, I argue that Luciferian pride, or sinful, negative pride is mostly group pride, and healthy, loving, positive pride mostly is individual pride.

 

T: “An instructive lesson on religious pride from the New Testament is found in the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (Luke 18: 9-14). It is aimed at those ‘who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and treated others with contempt.’ It addresses spiritual pride, an especially subtle and dangerous temptation of religious people and leaders, which has been very much in evidence in recent years.

 

The well-known story of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector can help us recognize our own spiritual pride. It tells of a much-despised tax collector and a self-righteous Pharisee who went up to the temple to pray.”

 

My response: Observe that the Pharisee is self-righteous, openly bragging that he is spiritually and morally superior to pond scum like the lowly tax collector. His self-pride is affirmation of his relationship to others around him, and he asserts that he is superior to them. This pride is not individualistic but is an expression of snottiness accompany high social status, and that is the essence of group pride.

 

T: “The Pharisee proceeds to commend himself to God because of his careful observance of the law and to look down with scornful contempt on the sinful tax collector. ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ Notice in his prayer that his focus is really not on God at all but on how good he is and how bad others are. Here is pride wrapped up in the cloak of religion and giving it a bad name. The tax collector is so painfully aware of his sins and unworthiness before God that he cannot even lift his eyes as he stands in the back of the temple, far from the altar. Pounding his breast in sorrowful contrition over his sins, he can manage only the desperate plea, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.’ In the Greek text, it actually reads ‘the sinner.’ His focus is very much on his own sins, not the sins of others, and especially on his need for God’s mercy.”

 

My response: It seems that the contrite, humble tax collector is individualistic here, with no focus on the sins of others, while the arrogant, preening Pharisee is filled with outrageous intellectual, individual pride, which he is. Both men are groupist, and the repeated pattern that worldly success puffs up many formerly humble groupists that are now successful and respected. That is not individual pride.

 

T: “In a surprising reversal of expectation, Jesus says that God answered the tax collector’s prayer, not the Pharisee’s. Then he concludes with his main point: ‘everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

 

My response: I do not urge people to self-efface to seem humble before God, because that extreme leads to their need to compensate by flaunting and bragging once they have made it, or they as ideologues are brazenly arrogant in pushing their cause upon others intolerantly and fanatically.

 

Rather, I suggest people love themselves, love God and love others in a mode of calm, respectful modesty, neither putting the self down, nor puffing the self up. If the self is an individuator working for a good deity, then that self can express his individual pride without making a big deal out of it, without offending God or others.

 

T: “Another lesson on religious pride strikes even closer to home for true believers. If we are inclined to say to ourselves, ‘Lord, I thank you that I am not like that proud Pharisee,’ we should bear in mind that the apostles themselves were infected with pride and disputed with one another about who was the greatest (Luke 22:24-27). Sadly, self-promotion, in pursuit of reputation, influence and ‘success,’ is evident in some of the ministry leaders even today. But if the apostles had to struggle with it, who are we to think ourselves exempt.”

 

My response: Thomas is offering wise advice here: that we never know when we have wandered away from the straight and narrow path, wandering into sin, arrogance, bad practices, and the inability to detect what is true, and who we have become. It is easy for any of us to lose our way.

 

T: “It would be easy to conclude that pride is the special problem of those who are rich, powerful, successful, famous, or self-righteous. It takes many shapes and forms and affects all of us to some degree. The widespread, chronic preoccupation with self in American culture, for example, is rooted in pride and can give rise to or intensify our emotional problems.”

 

My response: It is true that worldly successful do have a special problem with pride—more than the less successful, but all are group creatures somewhere along the ladder of social and class stratifications so belonging to the group and increasing one’s social status in whatever group that one clings to and exists within are two of the most corrupting forces working on humans. This group pride based on assigned social rank, and competing to climb higher and reach the inner circle of power and prestige does wrench and disfigure every human it touches.

 

The present American obsession with the self with its narcissistic artificial self-consciousness is a set of maladaptive behaviors displaying one’s rank and group clout to the public for public approval and envy. This group pride ruins all that live by its dictates.

 

T: “Any neurotic is living a life which in some respects is extreme in its self-centeredness . . . the region of his misery represents a complete preoccupation with himself. The very nature of neurotic disorder is tied to pride. If the sufferer is hypersensitive, resentful, captious, he may be indicating a fear that he will not appear to advantage in competitive situations where he wants to show his worth. If he is chronically indecisive, he is showing fear that he may do the wrong thing and be discredited. If he is over-scrupulous and self-critical, he may be endeavoring to show how praiseworthy he really is. Thus, most neuroses, are, from the point of view of religion, mixed with the sin of pride.4

 

Much more could be said about pride, but space fails us. Let’s sum up the biblical perspective and move on. Pride can be summarized as an attitude of self-sufficiency, self-importance, self-exultation in relation to God. Towards others, it is an attitude of contempt and indifference.  As C.S. Lewis observed, ‘Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up every possibility of love, or contentment or even common sense.5 The depth of pride can vary from one person to the next and be obvious or concealed. In the Old and New Testaments it is a truism that God will not the creature to exalt itself against the Creator. Pride provokes God’s displeasure, and he has committed himself to oppose it.

 

If your pride causes you to exalt yourself, you are painting a target on your back and inviting God to open fire. And he will. For he has declared his determination to bring it low wherever he finds it, whether among angels or humans, believers or unbelievers. It was pride that caused Lucifer to be cast out of heaven and Adam and Eve to be cast out of Eden. And it is pride that will be our undoing if we tolerate it in our lives. The danger of pride is a sobering reality that each of us needs to ponder. Truly, it is our greatest enemy.

 

However, chances are good that most of us do not see pride in our lives. For while it is easy to see pride in others, it is very difficult to see it in ourselves. C.S. Lewis observed that ‘there is no fault which makes a man more unpopular and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it in ourselves, the more we dislike it in others.’6”

 

My response: Observe how people are subjectively self-deluding, only able to objectively see pride, sin, and fault at work in their neighbors. People without self-esteem or positive individual pride—the majority of people in all classes—are irrational people that cannot put their illusions and rationales aside to see others and themselves realistically as individuators are able to do easily for they live in the truth and in reality about themselves and others, and positive pride aids them in being able to be impartial, to see people and things as they are, and characterize what is going on with truthful speech.

 

T: “But he does suggest a couple of ways to detect its presence. First, Lewis quoted William Law from chapter 15 of A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life ‘there can be no surer proof of a confirmed pride than a belief that one is sufficiently humble.’ Also, ‘if you want to find out how proud you are, the easiest way to ask yourself, ‘How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take notice of me, or shove their oar in, or patronize me, or show off?’7  Because it is tricky to recognize, we are perhaps best off to earnestly seek God in prayer and ask him to reveal to us any sinful pride in our lives so we can repent and forsake it. Another step we might take is to ask those who live or work with us if they see significant expressions of sinful pride or arrogance in our life.”

 

My response: Tarrants and Christians overemphasize the need to be humble and underemphasize the need to be proud of merited personal accomplishment. I think enlightened self-interest should motivate most people most of the time, and, that we need to be at peace, and not be too hung up about humbling ourselves or showing off. We need not do much of either: rather, we should treat God, ourselves and others with dignity, courtesy, and respect, and never brag and swagger, even when we do feel proud. I think these moves are sufficient to avoid prideful sinning.

 

T: “There is, of course, a good type of pride. Paul, for example, was proud of the churches he had established. But this was not arrogant or self-exalting pride. He made clear that his accomplishments were the fruit of God’s grace to him and through him (Rom. 15: 17-19).”

 

My response: Thomas’s faint praise for pride above is unacceptable. One can be proud of one’s merited successes without being guilty of arrogance, self-exalting pride, or disrespecting God.

 

T: “Occasionally, God mentions boasting, but this is a matter of highlighting what God has done by his grace, even through Paul or in those churches. It is never self-exalting. These days most of us will say we are proud of our children and our sports team or perhaps something we have accomplished. In cases like this, we are (one hopes)saying that we are really pleased about something good and are not engaging in the sinful type of pride and arrogance the Bible condemns.

 

 

Humility

 

Pride is a universal human problem. Everyone suffers from it to some degree. When we have exalted ourselves in pride, God does not want to punish us and bring us low but rather to forgive us and restore us. He says, again and again in Scripture, humble yourselves and I will exalt you. This gives us hope and encouragement. God takes pleasure in our efforts to humble ourselves, and he loves to bless and exalt the humble.”

 

My response: The good deities are proud but not arrogant individuators exemplifying good, individual pride, and expect the same from humans as creators, kind people, as individuators. It is the devil that wants us to humble ourselves and that mindless, easy surrendering really pleases Sa.

 

T: “For just as pride is the root of all sin, so ‘humility is the root, mother, nurse, foundation of all virtue,’ as John Chrysostom once remarked.”

 

My response: I think that humility is the root of all sin, and pride is the root of all virtue.

 

T: “Admittedly, humility and the humbling of oneself is out of fashion in today’s world and seems most unappealing to most of us.”

 

My response: Perhaps many people today are not humble in line with Biblical expectations, but they are still humble and self-loathing, because they exemplify and demonstrate their group pride and arrogance all the time, and that is not the good pride that God supports.

 

T; “However, as Johnathan Edwards said, ‘We must view humility as one of the most essential things that characterizes true Christianity.’ Our perspective on humility can be radically changed if we ponder and meditate on the greatest example of humility in history: Jesus Christ. By the very act of leaving heaven, coming to earth, and taking the form of man, he demonstrated an unfathomable humbling of himself. Throughout his life on earth, Jesus demonstrated a spirit of profound humility, saying he came ‘not to be served, but to serve, and give his life as ransom for many’ (Matt. 20:28). On his last night with the disciples, he took a towel and basin and washed their dirty feet (John 13: 12-17). Andrew Murray captures it well, ‘Christ is the humility of God embodied in human nature; thee Eternal Love humbling itself, clothing itself in the garb of meekness and gentleness, to win and serve and save us.’8 “

 

My response: I am not the egoist as radical as is Ayn Rand. When good gods, like Jesus did, do such heroic self-sacrifices, something like what Jesus did when he humbled Himself and died on the cross to open the way to heaven for all humans, this is a selfess and humble act to commit, but it is also so heroic that one wonders if it can be better interpreted as in the self-interest of that divinity or human great soul sacrificing so much to help people. For me, it is not easy to distinguish if Jesus was acting in the interest of others (He was) or in his ultimate self-interest (acting lovingly as a divinity because so acting at that time was consistent with the Self he wanted to be and had to be.)

 

T: “The apostle Paul may well have been thinking of this very scene in the Upper Room when he urged the believers in Philippi: Have this mind among yourselves which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by being obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross (phil. 2:5-8).

 

Paul is here encouraging ordinary believers in a local church, who apparently have some measure of sinful pride in their hearts and relationships, to reflect on and adopt the attitude and actions of Jesus their Lord and follow his example of humility.

 

The consequences of such an attitude may give us pause. Humbling ourselves could be costly in the workplace, the community, or in other ways. However, that is shortsighted worldly perspective. For the passage continues: Therefore, God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth, and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Phil. 2:9-11).

 

In Jesus we have the ‘example of all examples’: those who humble themselves will be exalted! And this is meant to guide our lives in the world. If we take care of humbling ourselves, we can trust God to take care of exalting us.

 

How do we gain the mind of Christ and humble ourselves? To put on the mind of Christ, we will need to make a firm decision to ponder, understand, and adopt Jesus’ way of thinking; his values and attitudes must become ours. His strong emphasis on humility and meekness and his example of it must take hold of our thinking, our desires and our conduct.”

 

My response: If one is an individuator and walks with God, one is justifiably proud if one is loving, artistic, virtuous and holy; in this there is no requirement to humble ourselves excessively or needlessly, or to brag and strut at all, ever. It is far nobler to be assertive than meek, and that is our moral duty, so I do disagree with the Christians here.

 

T: “We must admire his humility and want it for ourselves. For this to happen, we need to earnestly and regularly pray for the need to understand what Jesus meant when he called men and women to humble themselves. We discover that from the Greek word Jesus and the apostles used, tapeinos, which conveys the idea of having a right view of ourselves before God and others.9  If pride is an exalted sense of who we are in relation to God and others, humility is having a realistic sense of who we are before God and others. We must not think to highly (or too lowly) of ourselves. Rather we must be honest and realistic about who and what we are.”

 

My response: If one is individuating, loving, God-centered, virtuous and holy, then one can feel proper self-pride, and yet remain humble in the sense of never taking oneself too seriously, neither seeking approval or criticism from others, but honestly appraising their feedback, welcome or uninvited. We must not think too highly of ourselves, or too lowly of ourselves, but if we are persons of noble character, we have a right and duty to think better of ourselves than too lowly about ourselves. We must never lie to ourselves, to others, or God, being in the know about who we are and what we are, and we must never be supercilious towards God, others, or ourselves.

 

T: “This lies behind Paul’s thinking when he tells the Romans, ‘For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment’ (Rom 12:3). He then proceeds to instruct the believers in how to use the spiritual gifts God has imparted to them to serve one another (Rom 12:4-8). In other words, humility is having a right view of ourselves in relation to God and others and acting accordingly.

 

What is a right view of ourselves? Specifics will vary from person to person,  but certain things are common to us all. We are God’s creatures: small, finite, dependent, limited in intelligence and ability, prone to sin, and soon to die and face God’s judgment (Heb 9:27). But we are also God’s children: created, loved, and redeemed by God’s grace alone, not by anything in or of ourselves; and gifted by God with certain unique gifts, abilities, resources, and advantages, which are to be used for his glory.”

 

My response: I agree that we should maverize utilizing our abilities, resources, and advantages for God’s glory, and perhaps we can get some indirect credit. That will suffice. We should be working for God or we will be working for Satan and Lera. We are on one team or the other.

 

T: “As Paul reminds the Corinthians, ‘What do you have that you did not receive? If you then received it, why do you boast that you did not receive it?’ (1 Cor. 4:7). Frequently reminding ourselves of these things is important.”

 

My response: If we work and individuate, we get some of the credit for what we create, and God wants us to have that credit, for without due credit, humans would have no incentive to ever try to be better.

 

T: “Having a right view of God and ourselves has a profound effect on our relationships with others. As Paul goes on to say to the romans, ‘Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly.’ (Rom. 12:16). And as he said to the Philippians, ‘Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant that yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others’ (Rom. 2:3-4). As we refuse to be preoccupied with ourselves and our own importance and seek to love and serve others, it will reorient us from self-centeredness to other-centeredness—to serving and caring for others just as Jesus did for us. In the narcissistic culture of contemporary America, this is a particularly powerful countercultural witness of Christ’s presence and lordship in our lives.”

 

My response: Here Thomas openly links being humble with altruism and other-centeredness and being sinfully proud with egoism and self-centeredness. I could not disagree more.

 

T: “Truly, humility is our greatest friend.”

 

My response: Truly, humility is our greatest enemy.

 

T: “It increases our hunger for God’s word and opens our heart to his Spirit. It leads to intimacy with God, who knows the proud from afar, but dwells with him ‘who is of a contrite and lowly spirit (Isa. 57:15). It imparts the aroma of Christ to all whom we encounter. It is a sign of the greatness in the kingdom of God (Luke 22:24-27).”

 

My response: Humility increases our hunger for the devil who is of lowly self-esteem and maximum self-hatred. Humility makes us favor Satan.

 

T: “Developing the identity, attitude, and conduct of a humble servant does not happen overnight. It is rather like peeling an onion: you cut away one layer only to find another beneath it. But it does happen. As we forsake pride and seek to humble ourselves by daily deliberate choices in dependence on the Holy Spirit, humility grows in our souls. Fenelon said it well, ‘Humility is not a grace that can be acquired in a few months: it is the work of a lifetime.’ And it is a grace that is precious in the sight of God, who in due course will exalt all who embrace it.”

 

My response: My suggestion that Jesus wants us to forsake humility and group pride for good individual pride, egoism and self-realizing is a tough sell to Christians and Jews, because the Bible has told them that they are correct. All I can do is continue to try and set them straight.

 

T: “Notes on the Tarrants paper.

1.     C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster Touchstone Edition, 1996) 109, 111.

2.     See Augustine, The City of God 14.13; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, ques. 84.

3.     Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1974) 1:398-404.

4.     Gordon Allport, quoted in Solomon Schimmel, The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 28.

5.     Lewis, Mere Christianity, 112.

6.     Lewis, Mere Christianity, 109.

7.     Lewis, Mere Christianity, 110.

8.     8. Andrew Murray, Humility (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, nd), 17.

9.     Colin Brown, The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1967), 2:259.”

 

 

 

 

 

E          Hyper-Intellectuals

 

Here are my notes and comments on Jordan Peterson YouTube video from 7 years ago (2017), and it was circulated by Philosophy insights, and the title of the video is Jordan Peterson’s Advice for Hyper-Intellectual People

 

J for Jordan Peterson: “Not everybody is equipped to or is interested in engaging in high level discussion of abstractions of creative or intellectual ideas. You hear this idea that everyone is creative. That is a lie.  It is as straight forward as that. True creativity is very rare.”

 

My response: Nonsense, it is not just geniuses and hyper-talented people that can think profound, original thoughts, or produce great art. Anyone can create great art, and think deep original thoughts, and they should, especially as maverizers.

 

J: “If you happen to a creative person or someone who is profoundly interested in ideas, you are in a pronounced minority.”

 

My response: Only a few are naturally or accidentally creative or think profoundly, but all can maverize and create and think deeply.

 

J: “You are in a pronounced minority, just as there are minorities just as if you were extremely extroverted, extremely agreeable, or extremely conscientious. These are minority issues. What you do is you find like-minded people who are capable of engaging in that. You know a heavy weightlifter will compete with heavy weightlifters, and everyone thinks that is fine.

 

The same thing applies to intellectual and creative endeavors. What you do is try to find a community that where such interests are the nature of the community. You probably have to find a relationship like that as well.

 

Question from the audience: ‘Is that the silo mentality?’

 

J: ‘I don’t think so. What contributes to the siloing is the arrogance that goes with it. You can be interested in ideas and you can be creative. That is the arrogance of the intellect. That is the thing the Catholic Church warned about for centuries—the arrogance of the intellect.’ ”

 

My response: It seems that Jordan agrees with the Catholic Church that the arrogance of the intellect is Luciferian pride in rebellion against God, and that is a cardinal or mortal sin.

 

J: “So if you are wise as well as smart and there is no relationship between being smart and being wise. They are not the same thing. There is no quick pathway from smart to wise. Some of the people that I have known who were very wise—some of them were intellectually impaired, and were still wise.”

 

My response: I agree.

 

J: “So it is arrogance that brings up the block. I see this particularly in United States.  I see this there a lot. The last time I was there, I have some friends down there and some of them are very, very smart people. Some of them were talking about the Trump voters with contempt. I thought you had better watch that because that is 50% of the population. And it might be convenient to think they are stupid and beneath you, but that is not conducive to a civil state and there is no evidence that it is true because there is no straight line between intelligence and wisdom.

 

If your character is developed and you are intelligent, you can have your siloed, creative community, but have you developed enough wisdom to see all that people can do that are of high ethical utility, that are outside the intellectual domain?

 

I think that is why in the New Testament Christ is a carpenter. Right. First of all, carpentry is one of those jobs that if you are dishonest it manifests itself immediately because what you build falls down. And so if you are an honest carpenter you build a good house. There is a nice metaphor there.

 

But it is also a warning in some sense against the equation of intellectual brilliance with moral superiority. So, if the intellectuals would drop their moral superiority—and fat chance there is of that—the divide between working class and the elite would resolve, and there is every reason to have respect for decent working-class people. I mean that it is on their labor that the Left wing hypothetically agrees that the entire edifice of the culture is resting.

 

So, you can have your cake and eat it too but you have to not assume that your niche makes you superior, and it is very difficult for smart people.

 

There is this scene in Nietzsche—In Thus Spoke Zarathustra—where the prophet comes down from a mountain and he comes into the public square. And there is a crowd around this midget only a few inches high who has this gigantic ear and everyone is marveling at him, and that is what makes the modern intellectual. It is a midget with a giant mouth not an ear. The being is under-developed but the being is hyper-activated. And it makes the person extraordinarily unbalanced. It is because they can’t compete outside the intellectual realm, and that makes them bitter, because they tend to think I am so smart, everything should just come to me.

 

Sorry, that is not how the world works. And that attitude is immediately evident to people that they are talking to a smart person in the manner that they talk. These smart people are arrogant intellectuals of that sort. The Simpsons did a good job with Comic Book Guy. He was completely useless in every possible dimension with an IQ of about 160. It happens a lot.”

 

My response: Nerds and intellectuals can be arrogant against practical, less intelligent people who can function in the world, and the nerds and clerisy need to work at functioning in the world, and they can improve at practical skills.

 

The arrogant common people, look down on the clerisy. If they maverize, they can be hybrid intellectuals-plumbers like Eric Hoffer was a longshoreman philosopher, and the average worker that is a self-taught, uncredentialed intellectual can then relate to the clerisy.

 

 

Here from some Jordan Peterson lecture are my notes from his audience interaction.

 

Audience Member: “ ‘I have a couple of questions about dialogue and engaging in dialogue with people. I have a very high need for intellectual stimulation. I can’t get that with most people. It is like you can have a dialogue for a time.”

 

Jordan: ‘That is high trait openness.’

 

Audience Member: ‘Yes, then they can start to run out of ideas, and then it falls apart and this a problem that intellectuals have quite frequently: that once they start reading difficult stuff, they stop wanting to talk to regular people and contributes to the discontent you see between intellectuals and the working-class people, and stuff like that. And the other question I had--.’

 

Jordan: ‘Wait.’

 

Audience Member: ‘How can it be addressed? How can I address this?’

 

Jordan: ‘Part of the answer to that is that is what universities are for.’ “

 

My response: If the individuators is rational and intellectual, he is proud of what he personally thought up, but is not haughty to less educated people than himself. He would regard such insulting misbehavior as most inappropriate.

 

 

 

 

F

 

9/4/2024: I saw a brief internet clip last night of Jordan Peterson talking about self-consciousness: I was flabbergasted. From memory, I recall that he went on about how psychologists have known for decades that self-consciousness is linked to negative emotions like depression, suicidal thoughts, etc. I assume this is an implicit criticism of egoist ethics, that the individual should pursue his own interests and seek what makes him happy.

 

It seems to me to hint that if people were humble and not self-conscious, they would be altruistic and other centered, and that is where they find happiness, mental and spiritual health, and it is, according to Jordan, the pathway to meaning.

 

Then he goes farther and insists that the individual cannot embrace or substantively encounter the eternal in a mode of self-consciousness.

 

The kind of self-consciousness or shallow self-absorption, that is selfish, petty, immoral, narcissistic, and sick and that does corrupt one, is not individualistic, sane, or rational. It is a superficially encountered self that is linked to group-living and group approval and it is neither individualistic or other-centered in a constructive way, and I think this self-consciousness, which exists, is widespread and needs to be condemned, is really shallow, sick other-centeredness disguised as excessive self-interest and that Peterson and others like him have mistakenly made such pathetic, tea-deep self-obsession synonymous with a rich self-consciousness of the individuator who is primarily self-concentrating but is linked to maverizing and constant realistic uplifting loving healthy interacting with the world, with God, with objective reality itself.

 

The good deities and Good Spirits are intellectuals and rationalists that use language and communicate most effectively in everyday, ordinary language, in a state of everyday consciousness in the world as it is.

 

I have long suspected Jordan was an existentialist, though many existentialists are subjective individualists with a powerful, deep, passionate sense of the celebrated self, of which the self is self-conscious in a heightened, vibrant manner.

 

Still, if one—as Jordan appears now to stress—maintains that the human seeker can only encounter God epistemologically or mystically, as an irrational seeker of divine truth, then the humbled self, with little or very subdued sense of self-consciousness, gets that ego out of the way, so the eternal or divine can be communed with directly: the divine consciousness or Ego is able to enter one’s consciousness fully and deeply, once the self-consciousness mode of the self-interacting with the eternal is abandoned.

 

One can encounter the eternal this way, but it may be anti-humanistic to promote this path to God. God is an Individuator of Supreme Self-Consciousness, and might well insist that humans contact the divine this way as the preferred mode of mortals communing with immortal, good beings. Jordan might believe something like the individual and his soul (atman) can only actually interact meaningfully and comprehensibly with the eternal/Brahmin/Supreme Reality by a total loss of self-consciousness, a developed, higher level of ordinary, everyday consciousness kept in conscious control of the consciousness during religion exploration with the eternal as well as when putting gas in one’s car at the gas station.

 

This is what Jordan seems to be saying, and the self is not only to be humbled the self as a conscious being (everyday state of awareness of the physical world and others around us) is abandoned as the one as atman self-effaces to allow Brahmin to irrationally and spiritually to come to full conscious bloom inside one’s soul. Human effort to think, be conscious and use language just get in the way, let alone when the individual seeker is proud and vain. Then his distance from God, and rebellion against God is pure sin, and this rejection of God, as the asserted self is the most effective Luciferian technique for keeping God as Christ or Brahmin out of one’s soul, and as such, one is suffused with confusion, cloudiness and misunderstanding.

 

How do I epistemologically reconcile Ayn Rand and Christianity along a Mavellonialist trajectory? I seek the unite the world of things with the world of spirits, and help traditional deities be accepted and learned via egoist ethics and religious practice. I intend no disrespect or attempt to overthrow any traditional good deity like Jesus.

 

 

G

 

There was a online two-age response to Jordan Peterson’s take on pride by someone just called Reisen who posted his comments in June, 2024

 

I will quote his full remarks, all 2 pages of them and comment on them.

 

R for Reisen: “You need to face challenge, and facing challenge, you need courage. And courage is founded upon pride.”

 

My response: I agree.

 

R: “Pride is what makes you think: I can do this! I am capable. I will fight it.

 

Without pride you will be scared shitless and you will have no courage. And therefore, you will be useless. You have to be proud to anything worth doing.”

 

My response: Amen.

 

R: “That is the right response to taking responsibility and doing something that matters to you. If you were not proud of doing that . . . you would not do that.

 

This is why pride has always been one of the key virtues of the heroic figures of old heroes and civilizations, figures like Alexander the Great, Achilles, Hector and many others. The culture that existed for thousands of years before ours and that shaped western civilization with helenic culture.”

 

My response: I like Reisen’s take, and I think the good deities, individuators all, proud, loving, active and virtuous, would want their followers, humans, to live like positively prideful heroes, real or mythical, from the helenic culture and ancient times.

 

R: “Aristotle himself wrote: ‘Pride seems even from its name to be concerned with great things.’ And, thing is, you cannot achieve great things, you cannot achieve something worth achieving, if you have no pride.’ ”

 

My response: So true. If positive, individual pride is the proper orientation of the individual towards the receptive good deity, that is a loving, self-regarding spiritual and worldly life approach, lived and practiced by individuators encountering the deity worshipfully, his individuated self-sacrificing maverizer religious gift by the maverizing individual is offered to the good deity and good deities that maverize and create on a grander scale, but appreciate and demand such repeated performative, existential gifts from his or her human follows of real pride and original ideas about growing the cosmos, or the kingdom of the Divine Couple.

 

R: “ ‘Such, then, is the proud man, the man who falls short of him who is unduly humble, and the man that goes beyond him is vain.’ “

 

My response: Aristotle, here, seems to advise that the proud man is moral and just, an ideal for others to emulate, for he is neither unduly humble or so arrogant and proud that he has become vain. The moral law of moderation runs deep in Aristotelian ethics. The law of moderation might help correct the excessive emphasis on humility and self-effacement demanded of humans in Christian circles. One of course never is defiantly proud or insulting towards any good deity; it is blasphemous, repugnant and will arouse just retaliation against the blasphemer by powerful deities that are better feared than disrespected, less one wishes to be destroyed.

 

R: “And he says, there is a difference between pride and vanity. Without pride, you become unduly humble, lazy and insecure, unable to do anything, but with vanity you underestimate your challenges and fail as well.”

 

My response: I would identify negative pride or group pride as a cardinal sin when humans are vain.

 

R: “There is a difference between arrogance (vanity or superb) and pride. One, the first, is where you are unequal to the task and the second, pride, is where your dreams are big. The former is commonplace stupidity . . . but the latter is a rare species which is hard to find.”

 

My response: Individual pride need not be rare and the masses, each of them can dream big, and do great, talented acts of originality and beauty. God approves and wants us to make this a way of life.

 

R: “ ‘Pride, then, is concerned with honor on the grand scale, as it has been said.’ (Aristotle again.

 

There is no virtue without pride, pride is not a sin but a virtue.”

 

My response: It could be that positive pride is not only a virtue but the cardinal virtue.

 

R: “But what people are defending on the ‘pride month’ is not true pride, but a face.”

 

My response: The pride in pride month is group pride. Satan is the author of group pride, and is the ultimate selfish, selfless joiner, so practitioners of collective pride, are following dark counsel.

 

R: “Pride is concerned with Action, Challenge and Honor, you can only feel proud of what you achieved and of your qualities, feeling proud of things that you can no control over, such as the color of your skin, your sense of self-worth instead of finding it on your skills, qualities or achievements is a trap.

 

As we have been seeing on more recent centuries, people start to identify themselves with collectives and slowly lose their individuality. No wonder why political movements gain supporters, political ideologies feed on human insecurity, and, people, instead of finding true purpose for themselves, facing challenges with real pride and responsibility to achieve great things, prefer to find comfort on political collectives and ideologies.”

 

My response: I agree; I wonder if Reisen ever read True Believers by Eric Hoffer.

 

R: “Pride and humility are not opposites, but complementary. For pride makes you able to understand your strengths and qualities, while humility makes you able to understand your weakness and limitations.”

 

My response: Yes positive, individual pride and positive, individual humility are not opposites but are complementary traits both active and operational in the mind of a religious individuators serving the individuating Good Spirts.

 

In the world, where religious faiths or fake, secular pseudo-faiths (ideologies or causes), abound, there the men of words that run these causes do demand of true believing subordinates that they humble themselves utterly, and then, towards the outside world, they are the most arrogant militant spouters of their one true cause, that the world is to bow down to or else face violent punishment and death.

 

R: “I tell you, with no humility you are arrogant, vain and superb, destined to underestimate what lies in front of you and fail your challenges.

 

But with no pride you are meek and unable to attain anything at all and to even face any challenge.

 

Therefore, it is better to have no humility, than to have no pride, as Aristotle himself says.

 

It is time . . . for humanity . . . to find their virtue and pride again.

 

If not there will be a time where mankind will no longer pride on their hearts, where no one will strive to be anything or do anything, to stand out and be his own being. The time of the most despicable man, when men will not give birth to great things anymore.”

 

My response: I like what Reisen thinks, that without individual pride, humans will not self-realize and give birth to great things anymore. Humans need to do some things on their own, and God expects them too, and they, the humans, can be proud of their own achievements, and God will be proud of them too.

 

But to be atheists and secular only and self-realize as such militant, radical transhumanists that each humans become a living deity, that would offend God as then humans will have exalted themselves at God’s expense, and God will humble them. All of that is too extreme, melodramatic, and violent, violating the law of moderate behavior, and reasonable expectations The overemphasis in Christianity on complete self-denial and complete self-humbling is calling that state of existing the highest virtue rewarded by God. God wants neither excess pride (collective or individual) as overstating human worth or debasing the self as a masochistic form of self-attacking. We can as individual worshipers of a good deity be properly, proportionately respectfully proud as individuals and humble as individuals with God’s support and backing, without offending and enraging God.

 

R: “I tell you the end of the World will not be shaky or violent like an explosion . . . But things slowly deteriorating and crumbling until nothing has meaning anymore.”

 

In the comments after Reisen’s article came these comments in the +Add a Comment section:’’ExtensionAgile1658: “ ‘It’s interesting take. I think can be courageous without pride. Pride is deadly sin and not for no reason. It can be a dangerous thing.’

 

Reisen: ‘It is not a deadly sin, it is a virtue as explained above. Lack of pride is the true deadly sin.’ “

 

My response: Yes, humility, especially group humility as low self-esteem is the true cardinal or deadly sin.

 

 

 

 

H

 

 

Dr. Roger Barrier was a pastor and respected Christian minister, so I am going to quote some of his ideas on pride, as quoted online, and he passed away in 2024. I will quote his article in full and comment on it.

 

Roger: “Why Does God Hate Pride? By Roger Barrier, May 11, 2019.

 

Dear Roger,

 

I was at the soccer field, sitting next to one of my Bible group friends, when my 10-year-old made a goal. I said to my friend, ‘I’m so proud of him.’

 

My friend replied, ‘it’s a sin to be proud. The Bible teaches that God hates pride.’ “

 

My response: I think that the Bible is interpreted accurately by Jews and Christians and Jordan Peterson is asserting that God hates pride. Jews and Christians are altruists and collectivists more than they are egoists and individualists, so the sinful behavior which God hates, which they call pride, is what I would refer to as humility. I think God hates humility, especially group humility more than individual humility, which can be virtuous.

 

Roger: “Is that right?

 

Samantha

 

Dear Samantha,

 

There is a giant difference between ‘proud’ of someone else and having ‘pride’ in yourself . . . and it’s a spiritual difference worth studying.”

 

My response: Note that Roger is okay with pride in God’s handiwork or in someone else, but not the individual being proud of himself.

 

Roger: “WHAT IS PRIDE?

 

Pastor and Theologian Charles Finney described pride as ‘a disposition to exalt self, to get above others, to hide our defects, and to pass for more than we are.’ “

 

My response: If exalting the self is believing one is innately worthy of bettering oneself by self-realizing as commanded to do and be by the Good Spirits, then exalting oneself is a virtue. If exalting oneself is an inaccurate self-assessment intended to insult, put down or attack others or God, then self-exaltation is then a vice.

 

Pride as the emotion accompanying the motive to get above others, or masochistically accepting and living without fighting back the aggressive dominance of sadistic others to put themselves above us, then pride is a vice. We have worth, and we all are to self-realize, putting none down and allowing none to put us down, and we live roughly as social equals.

 

To hide our defects might seem proud, but the one that does this more often is so humbled by his sense of insecurity and low self-worth that he feels he cannot live with the pain of anyone publicly discussing his flaws, so he hides them and denies that they exist, which they surely do.

 

We are not to pass ourselves off to God, others, or ourselves as more or less than we are. We want to be as accurate in self-describing as we can be, and as we maverize, we would be justly proud and accurate in stating that we have become a bit more, because we have worked very hard at self-development and have gained a bit of ground. Any improvement is welcome and impressive even if it is not the whole world.

 

Roger: “Founding Father Daniel Webster called pride ‘inordinate self-esteem, conceit, ostentatious display.’ “

 

My response: I am a champion of individual pride and individual humility, but we should never be conceited, arrogant or show off for that means we do not like the self, or the public that we have been discourteous to.

 

Roger: “My definition? ‘Pride is over-concern with myself.’ “

 

My response: If we are sane and moral, we are properly proud and humble when we are more concerned without oneself than we are being less concerned with oneself, without being self-obsessed or other-obsessed and self-rejecting.

 

Roger: “Pride destroys our relationship with God and others. It also makes us stupid. Here’s one of my favorite stories: A minister, a Boy Scout, and a computer expert were the only passengers on a small plane. The pilot said the plane was going down but there were only three parachutes and four people. The pilot added, ‘I should have one of the parachutes because I have a wife and three small children,’ So he took one and jumped.

 

The computer whiz said, ‘I should have one because I am the smartest man in the world and everyone needs me.’ So he took one and jumped.

 

The minister turned to the Boy Scout and with a sad smile said, ‘You are young and I have lived a rich life, so you take the last parachute and I’ll go down with the plane.’

 

The Boy Scout said, ‘Relax, Reverend, there are still two parachutes left. The smartest man in the world just picked up my knapsack and jumped out!’

 

I wanted to be the best pastor God ever had. I imagined walking through St. Peter’s Gate into heaven and hearing God say, ‘Oh, Roger. You’re finally here! You were the best pastor I ever had. You did things Moses never did!’

 

I thought that growing a big church made me a great pastor. But in truth, is this not pure, unadulterated, ugly pride?

 

Pride is a secret fondness to be noticed.

 

Pride is a love of supremacy.

 

Pride is drawing attention to yourself in conversation.

 

Pride is enjoying being flattered.

 

Pride is swelling out of self when we’re free to speak or pray.”

 

My response: Observe that Roger’s 5 examples above of sinful pride likely are such, but they all involve the individual preening himself to be noticed or gain rank, power, popularity and standing in his clique, group, or community, and that is socially engendered pride, group pride, bad pride, and it is not individualistic but altruistic and collective. The selfish social egotist had done the cause of individualism and accompanying egoist morality enormous damage because they are popularly regarded as equivalent, though they are diametrically opposed.

 

Roger: “Pride is loving to have your name at the top of the list.

 

Pride is when the praise of men is sweet to your taste.

 

A ‘Christianity Today’ survey of almost one hundred pastors of large churches revealed a great passion to build a large church, but not a corresponding passion to know God. That breaks my heart . . . I know it breaks God’s too.”

 

My response: To build a great church in the world is to be successful in a social context—group pride. To get to know God is a passion that motivates the individual supplicant, and the commitment to talk to God is exemplary of personal pride in action.

 

Roger: “           WHY DOES GOD HATE PRIDE?”

 

My response: God hates group pride more than individual pride, and God hates group humility more than individual humility.

 

Roger: “God is not out to hurt our pride. He is out to kill it. In ___, He declares. ‘I hated pride and arrogance, evil behavior and perverse speech.’ King Solomon writes in ___, ‘The LORD detests all the proud of heart. Be sure of this: ‘They will not go unpunished.’ “

 

My response: I admire this biblical list of what God hates: group pride and group arrogance, evil behavior, and perverse speech.

 

Roger: “When we understand why God hates pride so deeply, we will hate it too!

 

1.     God Hates Pride Because Of The Absolute Devastation That Comes Through It.

 

____ teaches that ‘Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.’

 

Satan, was the worship leader in heaven until he got proud. He said, ‘I will ascend to heaven. I will be like God.’ This is simply unadulterated pride. God and Satan were no longer friends; in fact, they were not archenemies.”

 

My response: Satan competed with God and sought to and was confident that he could overthrow God—that is collective pride at work, as the rebel schemes and revolts to gain the highest rank possible in the cosmic hierarchy, gaining maximum power of powerlessness to himself as the totalitarian ruler of the world.

 

It could not succeed—no one can overthrow all-powerful, or nearly all-powerful God, and it is foolish and suicidal to try.

 

My vision for the individuator or creator of positive individual pride is that he or she works for God as a living, angelic angel, tending God’s cosmos and growing God’s kingdom here on earth.

 

Roger: “Satan tempted Adam and Eve. Once again we see unadulterated pride: ‘You can be like God.’ They never walked together in the Garden again . . . and our sinful, ugly, broken world is the direct result of pride.”

 

My response: Roger may be correct in accusing the first couple to live of sinful pride, seeking to eat the forbidden fruit of knowledge, so that they could be like God, perhaps even attempt to overthrow God. Their original sin then made them naked, conscious, vulnerable, and relegated to everyday reality of sin, sickness, suffering and death.

 

Once they had conscious knowledge of the world, of good and evil, their powers of reasoning were awakened, and their preexisting free wills were not extra free. I think that being conscious, rational and free is a divine gift, for only those that wield free will are actually alive, and blessed with the chance to earn a path to heaven by being loving, holy and virtuous—and inviting Jesus to save one. If one does what is right, and earns a ticket in heaven, one can be proud of that individual character self-shaped, and that is not a sin in God’s eyes.

 

Roger: “2. GOD HATES PRIDE BECAUSE IT RUINS RELATIONSHIPS.

 

____ says, ‘Pride on breeds quarrels.’

 

____ declares, ‘There are six things the LORD hates, seven are detestable to him: haughty eyes, lying tongue . . . and a man that stirs up dissension among brothers.’”

 

My response: The haughty eyes, the lying tongue, and the trouble-makers are all altruistic, social sicknesses that are performative and destructive.

 

Roger: “When begins with pride ends with fighting among brothers”

 

My response: Most tribal and group intra-conflicts and inter-group-conflicts are social games, of violence that grow out of collective pride and altruist ethics.

 

Roger: “Once upon a time we needed new baby cribs for the church nursery. About half the women wanted steel and the other half wanted wood. The church family watched them ‘duke it out’ at a Wednesday night business meeting. No one won. But from the best I could tell, both sides were left ‘cut and bleeding’ by the side of the road.

 

Just think of how many church fights occurred because someone got proud! How many homes and civilizations are destroyed because of pride and selfishness?

 

 

3.     GOD HATES PRIDE BECAUSE PRIDE IS AN OVER-C0NCERN WITH MYSELF.”

 

 

My response: God hates collective pride because is over concern with oneself being expressed and acted upon has nothing to do with being an individual but is a cruel act of not caring for or taking care of the self or other properly as one seeks to gain that the expense of others in a social ranking war.

 

Roger: “The Bible says that our ‘self’ is the person that we are. It is often good and holy. Paul called this our new nature as Christians.

 

There are times when our ‘self’ is wicked and sinful. Paul calls this our ‘sin nature.’ Our sin nature manifests itself in three ways. Look carefully and you will realize that every single sin in the Bible traces back to one or all these three activities of the ‘self “

 

My response: Yes, humans are complex creatures, with dual natures, part good and part evil. Our evil nature is the stronger and more dominant, but our weaker, recessive good nature can be made strong and in control of our wills, as we grow out of our natural wickedness by choosing to take on the new, good self, the Christian self.

 

Roger: “Self-Reliance: ‘If I have a problem I don’t need you or anyone else to help. I can take care of it myself.’ This is a superiority complex.”

 

My response: This reaction from Roger seems totalistic. The good deities are individuators and want us to live and grow in their image and likeness as creators and individuators that work for them and accept orders from them, who are allies not competitors.

 

The good deities want their individuating human subordinates to be as self-reliant as they can be, but do not expect humans to be wholly self-reliant, and that is not even possible, let alone a morally desirable stance for an individuators to assume, because it puts needless distance between his good deities and himself.

 

Humans competing with the good deities and their aims may claim to be totally self-reliant and independent from Jesus and the other good deities, and maybe they are, but in their rebellious, collective pride, they are almost totally reliant, obedient to, and subservient to the wishes of Satan and the Evil Spirits. Their superiority complex is really worldly prancing about to compensate for their inferiority complex.

 

Roger: Self-Centeredness: ‘I will take from you to meet my wants and needs.” This is also a superiority complex. ‘I am more important than you are.”

 

My response: Note how this mooch, parasite and robber lives off of others around him, and weaker. He is an altruist and is self-centered, and Ayn Rand has lots to say about his kind.

 

Roger: “Self-Condemnation: ‘I’d love to do things for God but

 I’m not worth much. I can’t do much. God’s not interested in knowing me. This is an inferiority complex.

 

My wife Julie was sharing that she hated to ask anyone for help. Self-reliant and exhausted, she worked tirelessly in her music ministry until she realized her self-reliance was a form of pride. God wanted to bless others by coming alongside of her. What freedom!

 

My response: The inferiority complex ordinarily prevents one from becoming self-reliant or as an excuse for not manning up and getting work done.

 

Roger: “5. Pride ruins our ability to fulfill the Greatest Commandment to Love God and Love Others. 

 

Can you imagine that if you are filled with self-reliance, self-centeredness and self-condemnation that you would have a difficult time fulfilling ____?

 

___: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and Prophets hang on these two commandments.’

 

 

6. GOD HATES PRIDE BECAUSE PRIDE IS SO DECEPTIVE THAT WE MIGHT MISS IT FOR WHAT IT IS.

 

Author and theologian C.S. Lewis wrote, ‘There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which everyone loathes when he sees it in someone else, and of which hardly anyone imagines he is guilty . . . I am talking of pride.’ “

 

My response: As groupists, dripping with collective pride and collective humility, we are so deceived by ourselves and by others in our complex web of lies which I refer to as group-living, our subjective bias allows us no ability to see ourselves as we are: we can only see our neighbors fault, that is the only way we are objective. We are not truthful or objective unless we individuate and individual-live, and as such, know, love and live in the truth, and finally are able to see ourselves as we are—our earned not innate strengths that we can be justly individually proud of, and our earned, blameworthy flaws (we chose to do bad habits, not just our natural flaws) which is proper individual humility.

 

Roger: “People admit they are bad-tempered, cowards, jealous and bitter. But few accuse themselves of pride.”

 

My response: As group-livers of low self-esteem and selfless morality, they have little about themselves to be proud of in a good sense, so living a life of lies and self-deception, they will not admit to their group pride to continue to lead dysfunctional, sinful lives, going against the will of God for how they are to live.

 

Roger: “Why did Pastor ‘Jones’ have an affair? Of course he had some needs and tried to meet them in another person (self-centered selfishness). But the bottom line was pride. He thought he was above all else and somehow would get caught.

 

Why did ‘Bill’ the worship leader almost have an affair? He laid his eyes on a woman in the choir and began to lust. He arranged for her to accompany him to a music conference in California. Unfortunately for him, he used MasterCard to pay for the tickets and had them sent to his house.

 

All I can think of is that he was so blinded by the deceitfulness of sin that he did something really stupid?

 

7. GOD HATES PRIDE BECAUSE WE DEVALUE HIS IMAGE IN US.

 

The flip side of pride is self-condemnation, or what we might call an inferiority complex.

 

David wrote in      :

 

‘For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.’

 

I hear of a man who came running out of a Psychiatrist’s office. He was so excited. He gleefully said, ‘I found out in there I don’t have an inferiority complex. I am just inferior.’

 

Of course, some are extroverts and some are introverts. Both sides of the coin are capable of self-condemnation.

 

I’m suggesting that our self-condemnation and fear of what people think of us are nothing more than the flip side of pride, which is sin.

 

Why are you always withdrawing? Why? What’s the problem? Perhaps you’re afraid? You’re afraid of what others will think of you. This is pride!”

 

My response: Yes, it is sin and collective pride to brag or put oneself down in public to curry favor or disdain from the community audience. It is proper pride and individual humility to see oneself as one is, and describe oneself as one is, accurately in public, and not worry about what the neighbors think, though one always is attentive to what God thinks about one and one’s actions.

 

Roger: “HUMILITY IS THE ANTIDOTE TO PRIDE”

 

My response: Pride is the antidote to humility, which is collective pride in disguise.

 

Roger: “ ‘Submit yourself, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you,8 Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.9 Humble yourself before the Lord, and he will life you up.’ ____

 

What does humility look like?

 

Humility has many faces. Humility is allowing our needs to be met in context of others. Humility is washing dirty feet. Humility is receiving a compliment or a gift without trying to give it back. Humility is a heart of service to meet the needs of others. Humility is love and comforting others. Humility is tenderness and compassion. Humility is driving out selfish ambition and vain conceit. Humility is caring for the sheep on the back side of the mountain where no one else is around to see. Humility is considering others better than yourself. Humility is walking in the footsteps of Jesus. Only one time in all the Scripture does Jesus describe his character. He described himself as ‘gentle and humble of heart’  (____).”

 

My response: I think we should be at peace, and not consider others better or worse than ourselves, and ourselves as better or worse than them, and that is proper pride and proper humility.

 

Roger: “Look at Jesus!

 

‘Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself. He had equal status with God but didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human. Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death—and the worst kind of death at that—a brutal crucifixion.’ ____ MSG

 

 

WHAT IS ‘PROUD’?

 

Samantha, we have taken a long look at pride. We know what it is.

 

On the other hand, ‘proud’ has to do with feeling good about ourselves and rejoicing in the goodness and accomplishment of others. It’s okay to be proud of your son; just don’t become arrogant and obnoxious.”

 

My response: Being properly proud and properly humble is feeling good about ourselves and others when rejoicing in ours and their good and accomplishments, but we are never to brag and gloat in our own mind or be arrogant and obnoxious in public.

 

Roger: “My spiritual mother, Doris Wanslee, is the humblest person I’ve ever met. She prays earnestly for others. She constantly affirms and encourages those around her. Now, at the age of 90, Doris still leads prayer meetings for our church and attends every Sunday without fail. When I see Doris, I see Jesus.

 

Samantha, your son should always know you are proud of him! Affirm him. Encourage him. Love him unconditionally. But as he grows up, teach him to be selfless and humble.”

 

My response: I would urge her to teach him to be self-centered and proud more than selfless and humble, within the context of being a religious individuator.

 

 

Samantha, I know that I answered more than you asked; nevertheless, I hope this is helpful.

 

Sincerely, Roger.”

 

 

 

 

I

 

 

 

This section is from the Internet too, from something called Christianity Expert with minister Mary Fairchild, hereafter labeled M: “Christianity Expert

 

·      General Biblical Studies, Interdenominational Christian Training Center

 

Mary Fairchild is a full-time Christian minister, writer and editor of two Christian anthologies, including the ‘Stories of Cavalry.’

 

Learn about our Updated on October 28, 2020.

 

The sin of pride is a heart attitude expressed in an unhealthy, exaggerated attention to self and an elevated view of one’s abilities, accomplishments, position, and possessions. Pride has been call ‘the cancer of the soul,’ ‘the beginning of all sin,’ and ‘sin in its final form.’ Ten Hebrew words and two Greek words are generally used in the Bible to refer to it. Pride, in its sinful form, is the direct opposite of humility, a trait that is highly praised and rewarded by God.”

 

My response: What Mary is condemning her is group pride and group humility which are misunderstood and mislabeled in the Jewish and Christian faiths. Group pride and group humility, though it does not seem intuitive, are what God condemns in the Bible and punishes in people.

 

M: “The Sin of Pride

·      The sin of pride is an excessive preoccupation with self and one’s own importance, achievements, status or possessions.”

·      This sin is considered rebellion against God because it attributes to one’s self the honor and glory that only God is due.

·      Pride is the opposite of humility, a character quality that greatly pleases God, and one He rewards.

·      The Bible frequently speaks of God humbling the proud.”

 

My response: The group pride sinner is excessively obsessed with his self in relationship to the group live follows and is part of its pecking order distribution of power and status. God does and should receive most of the honor and glory, but De allows Good Spirits and living angels (individuating humans) to receive some modest honor and glory, as a reward for services rendered. 

 

Evil group pride is not the opposite of humility but grows out of humility or low self-esteem Good individual pride grows mostly out of pride.

 

M: “What Is Pride?

 

Pride is not always expressed as a negative quality in the Bible. It can carry a positive connotation of self-worth, self-respect, and self-confidence. The     communicated a positive sense of pride when speaking to the believers in Corinth:

 

‘I have the highest confidence in you, and I take great pride in you. You have greatly encouraged me and made me happy despite all our troubles’ (2 Corinthians 7:4,  ).’

 

Pride becomes sinful when its excessively self-focused and self-elevating. This kind of pride is what most often appears in the Bible. The biblical sin of pride refers to a high or exalted attitude—the opposite of the virtue of humility, which is the appropriate posture people ought to have with God.

 

      Described pride as ‘an all-pervading sin.’ He said, ‘Pride is so natural to fallen man that it springs up in his heart like weeds in a well-watered garden . . . its every touch is evil. You may hunt down this fox, and think you have destroyed it, and lo! Your very exultation is pride. None have more pride than those that dream that they have none. Pride is a sin with a thousand lives; it seems impossible to kill it.”

 

My response: People must have a sense of personal worth, to go on living, and if they are self-deceived and wicked, then they must lie to themselves about what they are to say sane, so their pattern of self-lying is built upon sinful collective pride and sinful collective humility, group-living, and altruist ethics.

 

If people are in touch with themselves as they actually are, they will not lie to themselves, to others or to the good deities, and their pattern of truth-telling is embedded in proper individual pride and individual humility.

 

M: “Synonyms for pride in the Bible are ‘insolence,’ ‘presumptousness,’ ‘arrogance,’ ‘conceit,’ ‘high-mindedness,’ ‘haughtiness,’ and ‘egotism’.

 

In Hebrew, the concept of pride is often expressed figuratively with words that suggest height. An interesting expression in Greek refers to a person being ‘puffed up’ or inflated with pride. Rather than having substance, the prideful person is filled only with air:

 

‘He must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil’ (1 Timothy 3:6,   ; see also Corinthians 5:2; 8:1; 13:4; Colossians 2:18).

 

Why Is Pride A Sin?

 

Pride is viewed as a great sin and rebellion against God because it presumes to possess excellence and glory that belong to God alone.”

 

My response: When the individual, especially the devoted follower of a good deity, is a successful poet, she can right be proud of her excellence and glory in it modestly. This does not conflict with nor need conflict with the ultimate excellence and glory that belong to God alone.

 

M: The danger of pride is that most people are unaware of their pridefulness.: ‘You have been deceived by your own pride’ (Obadiah 3, NLT).”

 

My response: Here it is important to be humble in two ways. First, I do not like the word humble very much, but one should be humble in always striving to act modestly when alone talking to oneself, when socially engaged, or when conversing with God or one of the good deities, or Good Spirits.

 

Second, we cannot love ourselves, be properly proud, self-realize, or assist God or others if we are not humble enough to receive (repeatedly and periodically self-checking to see if we are still moral and correct in our conclusions) constant, often unpleasant feedback about the conclusions we have reached. We might be spot on, partially correct, largely mistaken, or simply lying to ourselves in our willful blindness. We must love truth more than our own egos, and then we receive truth, adjust to truth, and do right in line with the truth.

 

We cannot self-realize or morally gain ground unless we know who we are, what we think, what is right, how we are messing up, and figure out what we can do better.

 

I am noticing that many of these pastors and Christian intellectuals that are advocating that pride is the cardinal sin (It is, but they are confused: what they are describing as haughty, arrogant motive to compete with and even overthrow or kill God—an impossibility—we can ban God for a while but God will return and pound us into the ground—is not individualism but is individuals that are groupist and their pride is collective pride, demonic pride, and it is confused with individuators pride or good pride.)

 

These Christian intellectuals seem to quote C.S. Lewis a lot, and he was a fine, brilliant man and theologian and he hates individualist arrogant pride and he agrees with them. Now Lewis was best friends with the talented fantasy professor and Catholic writer, J.R.R. Tolkien who was such a devout Roman Catholic that he kept trying to convert Lewis to Catholicism, which Lewis refused to do. It i speculative on my part, but Tolkien the Catholic thinker with his likely conclusion that individual pride is the cardinal sin, it would be interesting to follow both writers in their fiction to discover how their Christian take on pride as the deadly sin, would influence their fictional character development. That Sauron, Saruman, Denethor and Boromir would corrupted by the Ring of Power because they thought they were strong enough to wield it without its destroying them, and they were completely foolish and wrong, whereas Gandalf,

Aragorn, Elrond, and Galadriel were humble enough to know their limits.

 

I think Tolkien is an incomparable moral psychologist, but I still insist that the arrogant, smart individuals that arrogantly concluded that they, being elite, smarter than others and better than others are mere groupist elitists at the top of the society heap vying for more power. Gandalf and the others united with other good-doers by their intellectual humility which made them afraid of the ring. And if one does not seek the power of powerlessness that is the devilish moral version of power manipulation, the one is loyal to the power of powerfulness plan for power wielding that is about realizing that proper pride and self-restraint allow one to refrain from refusing to keep power ever distributed among millions of people democratically, not centrally owned and so corruption determined and warped.

 

My wife like the idea of some individual pride as moral and that there is a need that people take care of themselves because they feel that they are worthy to be happy and healthy and lead moral productive lives to be saved as children of God (this is my addition).

 

 

M: “Pride is perilously deceptive: ‘Pride leads to disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.’ (Proverbs 11:2, NLT). It gives way to conflict and quarreling (Proverbs 13:10). Pride adversely affects one’s speech (Malachi 3:13; Proverbs 6:1-7).”

 

My response: If one is moderate in action, thought and word, one is less likely to get into trouble and is less likely, on average, to make foolish, perilous mistakes, and, this prudent approach to life (which I preach and often fail to practice) could can be construed as wise humility applied to behavior, or as acting with courtesy and care so that one’s public comportment is consistent with one values of being a good person, and that self-interest dictates that one is prudent, discreet, diplomatic and modest in public and in private.

 

It is difficult even for the wise, smartest people to detect and isolate what is true, but without an epistemological orientation of epistemic caution/carefulness/humility, the odds of getting reality wrong or distorting reality are much more likely to occur. The odds of doing evil, without being aware of the disastrous, undetected consequences of one’s poor choices implemented in an elated mood reflecting one’s full certitude, in one’s utter full self-confidence and self-righteousness, increases exponentially. Then militant, smug policy implementers make things much worse and prolonged by insisting that they are wise and that their horrible mistakes are fruitful and beneficial to the public.

 

And conflict and quarreling do grow out of pride, but, most often and most deadly, in tribe against tribe warring, in a mode of vicious, bloody collective pride.

 

M: “People do not think they need to ask         because they can’t admit or even recognize their own sinful condition.”

 

My response. I agree that when people can’t admit where they are sinful, flawed, ignorant, stupid in error, their unwilling to embrace the principle and practice of self-awareness extends from their lack of self-esteem (their collective pride and collective humility), much more than when they esteem themselves (Their individual pride and individual humility requires of them that they embrace and constructively integrate harsh truth, no matter how painful or disagreeable, every time that they encounter it.).

 

M: “As a result, pride also affects a person’s attitude towards others, often causing them to look down on others as less worthy or less able.”

 

My response: Mary is guilty of the error of contextual incompleteness: she only mentions sinful pride without including sinful humility.  And, when I advocate for virtuous pride, by the principle of contextual complete, I must admit, accept, and mention that one’s prideful orientation is always accompanied by its twin, the other side of the coin, one’s humble orientations practiced on oneself and then exported to the public domain.

 

I know that in each person, pridefulness (self-esteem or good/positive/individual) is good pride, and modest humility (good humility) occur when neither puts oneself or others up or down, but habitually treats others with courtesy and respect while assessing and judging each person’s character and action realistically and rather accurately.

 

Each arrogant, supercilious person is guilty of sinful, collective pride (showing off in front of his peers to gain their allegiance, praise, approval and to assert and gain social power over them) and is simultaneously guilty of sinful, collective humility. When he looks down upon those less powerful, less socially popular, less able or less worthy—in the eyes of the world not God—than he is, he is also sending out the clear message to other group-living collectivists in his nonindividuating circle, his dominant rank in the cherished social hierarchy, that he  is willing to be abused and put down from above, no longer being sadistic, but now masochistically, meekly receiving abuse and arrogant snubbing from those above him—smarter, more handsome, more popular, richer and higher up in worldly circles. The arrogant joiner sadistically exalts himself in front of and at the suffering expense of those socially beneath him, by humbling them in comparison to his exalted status. In return he is willing to be humiliated and humbled sadistically by those of higher pecking order rank than himself as they exalt themselves unfairly and malevolently at his expense, which hurt him and he is suffering, but he bears his corrupt humiliation at their hands because that is how the social world is set up.

 

When a woman is a woman of individual pride and individual humility, she loves herself, loves God and loves others. She is an individuator that invites all to individuate until most adults so live. In that social world—yet to occur anywhere—though all always vary in their abilities, they do not vary in their equal worth in the eyes of the Good Spirits. As individuators, none can predict who will make the most beautiful, wondrous, imaginative work of art or new mathematical theorem or a cunningly designed widget.

 

M: “Prideful people treat others with contempt and cruelty: ‘Mockers are proud and haughty; they act with boundless arrogance (Proverbs 21:24, NLT). Pride is at the heart of prejudice.”

 

My response: Yes, collectivist pride and group humility are at the heart of prejudice, regarding another as inferior and worth only of ill-treatment, because they belong to a rival tribe, or, worse, no tribal connection at all, just an atomistic individual out there swinging in the wind.

 

M: “The greatest danger in the sin of pride is that it keeps our eyes on ourselves instead of on      . In essence, pride causes spiritual blindness and eventual death.

 

 

Pride in the Bible

 

Pride is cited among some of the most glaring sins in the Bible. In Romans 1:30, Paul describes unrighteous people who will incur the wrath of God as ‘backstabbers, haters of God, insolent, proud and boastful. They invent new ways of sinning.

 

The       and all other Jewish leaders were some of the most prideful people in the Bible, noted for how they mistreated and spoke down to those beneath their social level.      Said of them:

 

‘And they love to sit at the head table at banquets and in seat of honor in the sysnagogues. They love to receive respectful greetings as they walk in the marketplaces, and to be called ‘Rabbi,’ . . . But those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted’ (Matthew 23:6-12, NLT).”

 

My response: Check out, in the last two paragraphs from Mary, that those that exalted themselves—thereby humbling, depreciating, and humiliating the stung masses beneath them—at banquet, in the synagogue, in the marketplace, the prideful, humble sinners were strictly social creatures, simply the elite rulers of the political or ecclesiastical pecking order in which they were highly valued and well-positioned to rule.

 

They were rude to and mistreated those beneath them as nonindividuating, group-loving elitists that they were, motivated by the negative side of altruist-collectivist morality, the default moral system for humans throughout history.

 

M: “Pride caused the downfall of King Uzziah, who dared to burn incense on the     and was struck with leprosy as his punishment by God (2 Chronicles 26:16).     became proud of heart after the Lord healed him. His pride brought God’s wrath not only against him, but also against all of Judah and Jerusalem (2 Chronicles 32:25-26).

 

   ‘s pride in accepting the people’s worship and refusing to give God glory for his greatness brought judgment. God struck with sickness, and he was eaten by worms and die. (Acts: 12:21-23).

 

Of the Prince of Tyre, the Lord said, ‘In your great pride you claim, ‘I am a god! I sit on a divine throne in the heart of the sea.’ “

 

My response: Humans as secular humanists and as sacred/religious humanists are authorized and rewarded by the good deities for individuating, but to go too far, disrespectfully, and rebelliously seeking to overthrow God and take God’s place on De’s throne in heaven is wicked and will not go unpunished or unanswered by the good deities or by the angered Good Spirts. That is Luciferian intellectual pride that Peterson denounces roundly, and rightly so.

 

Humans can modestly exalt themselves in the eyes of God, but pushing God aside to grab all the glory to oneself is going way too far in a dangerous game of betrayal and rebellion against the good deities.

 

M: “But you are only a man, and not a god, though that you boast that you are a god.’ (Ezekiel, 28:2, NLT). Many Bible scholars believe this passage refers to the original fall of        , which is also mentioned in Isaiah 14:12-15:

 

‘How far you have fallen from heaven, morning start, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations. You said in your heat, ‘I will ascend to the heavens; I will raise my throne above the starts of God; I will sit enthroned on the mount of the assembly, on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I wll make myself like the Most High.’ But you have been brought down to the realm of the dead, to the depths of the pit. (   )”

 

My response: Humans are guilty of Luciferian pride when they glory themselves excessively while downplaying God’s mastery, superiority, glory, and due deference, now withheld by swollen humans in charge. These wicked people shall be humbled by God, and if that does not scare the hell out of any sinner, then they are delusional and out of touch. God is. God rules. God gave us a job to, and we had better get at it while alive or else.

 

M: “    said, ‘Pride goes before the destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall. (Proverbs 16:18, NIV). In the Bible, pride not only caused the ruin of individuals but also nations. Israel became proud and forgot God. Ultimately, it was the sin of pride that caused the people of Israel and Judah to be cut off from the     of Canan (     3:16; Ezekiel 16:50, Hosea 13:6; Zephaniah 3:11). James 4:6 tells us that God opposes the proud but shows      to the humble.”

 

My response: Note that the sinfully proud and the sinfully humble are brought low by God, and whole nations can forget God and be humbled and punished.  But these sinfully proud people, as individuals and as a nation or society, are groupists following Satan and Lera, not the Father, the Mother, Jesus and the good deities; they are not individuating, godly individuators.

 

M: “Pride is one of the sins that will be widespread among people in

 

‘For people will love only themselves and their money. They will be boastful and proud, scoffing at God, disobedient to their parents and ungrateful.”

 

My response: Again, notice that in society, the realm of the collective, is where people become, proud, boastful, scoffing at God, and ungrateful. God is not only outside society and the sinful worldly and the sin-infested world, God is an Individual and Individualist, so proper pride and proper humility are egoist pride and egoist humility, and those in the world and the collectivist societies are animated and propelled forward into sin and rebellion against God, by a kind of corrupt pride (groupist) and corrupt humility (groupist) that is worldly not otherworldly. They will consider nothing sacred.

 

Note that the true-believing cultural Marxists of today are nihilists. They push to young to disobey their parents, to smash all great Western and Modernist tradition, and to hold nothing noble and sacred that is our Judeo-Christian and Greek tradition.

 

M: “They will be unloving and unforgiving; they will slander others and have no self-control. They will be cruel and hate what is good. They will betray their friends, be reckless, be puffed up with pride, and love pleasure rather than God’ (2 Timothy 3:2,NLT).”

 

My response: I agree with most of Timothy’s description of the evildoers but would like to note that there are good pleasures and good pains sought out by the individuators of good pride and good humility, and there are bad pleasure and bad pains craved by the nonindiviudators and sinners of bad pride and bad humility. The worldly are not just sinful because they seek pleasure, but bad pleasures, and the godly are not virtuous and holy and loving just because they are ascetic and serve duty first, though they must so act mostly, with some pleasure enjoyed too.

 

M: “The Bible says that pride is one of seven things that God hates:”

 

My response: God is logical and just, but God is also emotional, and, when filled with righteous anger against the defiant evildoer, God’s indignation against them and the evil that they promote rise to a level of passionate hatred. An angry, powerful good deity out to punish sinful humans is a terrifying prospect, a real possibility.

 

This shows that the individuating living angel or individuating human can be emotional as well as rational, even passionate and angry and violent upon occasion against evildoers—the good deities allay their just violence directed against recalcitrant humans, with restraint, mercy and forgiveness felt towards human sinners. The good deities are reasonable with a finely calibrated sense of personal, societal, and divine justice guiding them as they punish evildoers.

 

M: “There are six things the LORD hates, seven that are detestable to him; haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies and a person who stirs up conflict in the community (Proverbs 6:16-19, NIV).

 

People who reject God and godliness reject pride:

 

‘All who fear the LORD will hate evil. Therefore, I hate pride and arrogance, corruption and perverse speech’ (Proverbs 8:13, NLT).

 

‘I will not tolerate people who slander their neighbors. I will not endure conceit and pride’ (Psalm 101:5, NLT).

 

The Bible warns people to evaluate themselves honestly for the sin of pride.

 

‘Because of the privilege and authority God has given me, I give each of you this warning: Don’t think you are better than you really are. Be honest in your evaluation of yourselves, measuring yourselves by the faith God has given us’ (Romans 12:3, NLT).”

 

My response: One does not practice and live good pride if one thinks one is better or WORSE than one really is. He must always be honest with himself.

 

 

 

 

 

J

 

 

 

In this section, I am going to copy some excerpts from egoist philosopher and conservative secular humanist, Ayn Rand, and then I will comment on what she writes, to provide a perspective on human pridefulness so contrasting with Biblical injunctions against and condemnation of human pride as cardinally sinful, that these two alternative takes on human pride seem contradictory or mutually, exhaustively and exclusively antithetical, that no common ground can be found.

 

I reject that bleak conclusion firmly, as a metaphysical moderate. I am a follower of Jesus and Yahweh, but I am not a conventional Christian, but am something like a conservative Unitarian-Universalist that recognizes Jesus’ divinity as a son of God, and perhaps The Son of God, the Divine Couple, the Father and the Mother.

 

I do not want to see Christianity denied or pushed aside. I think Yahweh and Jesus are still central to the lives of billions of humans seeking divine comfort, guidance, and assistance.

 

To modernize and update Christianity without discarding it, I would add my own version of positive, individualistic human pridefulness and personal humility presented below as the cardinal virtue (ethically speaking). Of value, but of minor moral virtue, would be for the believer some residual modicum of wholesome, godly collective pride and collective humility, practiced by each believer in her personal life.

 

I would identify as the cardinal vice or sin for humans would be collective pride and collective humility—satanic traits—and this is the pride so railed against in the Bible, but they mis-identify it as individual pride, but it mostly is not but is group pride that is linked intimately to the Dark Couple, Satan and Lera, the Ultimate, Popular, Joiners that lead the rebellion against God, and have ensnared millions of human followers.

 

In Luficerian pride and humility, individuals live as group-belongers, and as they are selfless and without self-esteem though they ironically are selfish, proud, and masochistically humble as individuals—except when aroused as true believers marching in the millions as a phalanx shoving their mass movement down the throats of the entire nation or world itself.

 

The second reform I wish to bring to Judaism and Christianity is to replace traditional Christian and Jewish morality (majority constitution is altruism-collectivism emphasis, with little interest in the minority emphasis, egoism-individualism). That system for thousands of years has allowed Westerners to enjoy some mild individualism and rare individuating in their lives, while nonindividuating, altruistic morality and group-living were still the preferred ethical rubric for society.

 

I propose to reverse this traditional Western moral system by the operation of conversion: we will replace the strong emphasis on altruism, with a main emphasis on egoism as the recognized noble motivator of virtuous human behavior.

 

I convert the traditional Western morality of altruism-collectivism/egoism-individualism into egoism-individualism/altruism-collectivism. That will set people free to be good, finally.

 

Here is an excerpt on pride from Ayn Rand’s book, For The New Intellectual, Page 130 and 131: “Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned”

 

My response: Now, this concept that you are your own highest value is going to enrage Christian and Jewish thinkers—they will howl that she will burn in hell for insisting that mere mortal humans are their own highest value, for all value and glory belong solely to Yahweh or Jesus. I accept most glory and value belong to these and all good deities, but that they as Creators and Individuators, expect, demand and reward (and punish humans that refuse to obey) that humans create and individuate, a lifestyle of profound love, and the whole life lived as an individuators is a self-sacrifice of the self-pursuing its own spiritual and material improvement by means of enlightened self-interest, and that sacrifice is a gift given continuously as long as the individuating supplicant lives, and it is a repayment in gratitude for the gift of living and becoming, a gift given each individual with her divine spark in her, and in gratitude she lives like her good deities do, and that smidgeon of self-glorification and self-valuing of us by us is not an affront to the good deities, but is a thank you to them for the gift of life. As long as the individuators supplicant lives a virtuous and holy life, and remains modest and respectful and obedient and praising of the good deities, this individual positive pride need not be distorted into Luciferian sinful pride, and that is always a danger to be worried about, especially if people become more groupist again, and more self-sacrificing not to the good deities but to the state, an ism, a clique or collectivist faith run by Evil Spirits.

 

Note too that Rand like me insists that one not feel proud of oneself unless one has been productive and meritoriously has achieved something of significant worth: invented a widget, painted like da Vince, built a successful business, has farmed broccoli, and come up with a new kind, genetically altered with better flavor and more nutrients packed into it, etc.

 

When one is a second-hander and nonindividuator without honor, productivity, accomplishment or originality, that selfish, arrogant, egotistical, narcissistic, weirdly self-conscious creature—actually in altruistic, selfless and wrongly humble—then a sense of pride is bad, false and unearned and it is group pride and group humility.

 

Rand: “—that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind . . .”

 

My response: The self is to earn its happiness and place in the world, and, if one then feels proud, that pride is merited and virtuous.

 

 

 

 

K

 

My slack superficial scholarship will drive professional thinkers into howling protest, but that is okay, for, below, I copied two quick pages of references to the sin of prides on Google on 8/26/24 in anticipation for using them for this blog entry on pride. Below I will quote the excerpts and give credit as close as I can and then comment on what I quote.

 

The first entry is from: “ www. britannica.com—topic—pride—deadly—sin: Pride/Definition, Seven Deadly Sins, Scripture & Facts

 

Excessive love of one’s own excellence

 

pride, in Roman Catholic theology, one of the seven deadly sins, considered by some to be the gravest of all sins. In the theological sense, pride is defined as an excessive love of one’s own excellence. As a deadly sin, pride is believed to generate other sins and further immoral behavior and is countered by the heavenly virtue of humility.”

 

My response: Pride, group pride, and group humility, are the deadliest sins. By contrast, I assume that individual pride and individual humility, are how the Good Spirits rate themselves, and this allows humans that worship the good deities and maverize to, gain in being and expressing these virtues, these cardinal virtues from which all other virtues are generated.

 

Traditional pridefulness, condemned roundly in the Bible, is theologically defined as excessive love of one’s own excellence.

 

I have three questions about that: First, is one’s excellence actually excellence of any kind, or is it banal, inferior work that is referred to as excellence by its performer and owner? Even if the excellence is absence or is substantive, if the agent is groupist and practices faithfully group pride and group humility, that agent would serve Satan and defy God.

 

Second, one needs to be honest with oneself, and be creative and productive as an individuators, be moral, creative, and God-fearing, and then one might produce excellent products, or field an excellent character to be proud of.

 

One cannot simply announce that one is excellent when one is mediocre, awful as a nonindividuator.

 

Also, even if one is excellent as an indiviudator, one must have context, recognizing various degrees of excellence, and trashy output, all along the great chain of being, and then place oneself realistically somewhere along that hierarchy appropriately, about where one should be. Such a self-appraisal views one’s excellence—or the lack thereof—from a bird’s eye view so as to not to be puffed up and deluded in one’s subjective fantasies.

 

 

·                                          *                                  *                                  *

 From “www.learnreligions.com the-sin-of-pride

 

The Sin of Pride According to the Bible—Learn Religions . . .Pride is not always expressed as a negative quality. It can carry a positive connotation of self-worth, self-respect, and self-confidence. The apostle Paul communicated positive sense of pride speaking to the believers in Corinth. Pride becomes sinful when it is excessively self-focused and self-elevating . . .”

 

My response: This Christian account on pride seems a little more balanced. It points out that pride becomes sinful when it is excessively self-focused and self-elevating. Pride becomes even more sinful and dangerous when it is excessive group pride and group humility.

 

 

*                          *                                          *                                   *

 

From: “en. Wikipedia Seven_deadly_sins

 

Seven deadly sins—Wikipedia

 

Pride (superbia), also known as hubris, . . . or futility, is considered the original and the worst of the seven deadly sins on almost every list . . .”

 

My response: Pride as hubris or exaggerated pride as defined in The Merriam-Webster Dictionary is what Jordan Peterson referred to in a clip I saw today (9/12/24) as the Luciferian sin of intellectual pride which geniuses with an IQ of 145 are most susceptible to being corrupted by.

 

I think that we get prideful in a negative way when it is collective, excessive and self-absorbed in a unhealthy way.

 

The natural tendency to become prideful and slight God as soon as we enjoy significant good health and worldly success, that is the behavior and attitude of a groupist.

 

Ordinarily, the individuator, especially an individuator that is religious, would recognize himself more as he in in both appraisal modes of self-appraising, being accurately proud of oneself or humble, and these do not require that one get carried away going to extremes, being too proud or to humble towards God, who seeks and will not put up with either abject groveling or snotty taunting from from De’s people and supplicants.

 

 

 

L

 

It occurs to me that we do not want to be too humble more than we want to be too proud, and the best way to be both as an individual and in a way that does not sicken us is to base our feeling proud or humble on the truth about ourselves, based upon what we have accomplished or not.

 

 

 

 

 

M

 

 

8/9/24: Here are some YouTube snippets, videos of Jordan Peterson on Pride’

 

 

a.     Jordan: “You find any experience on the edge of development as engaging. That’s the line between chaos and order. And chaos is where you don’t understand things at all. And order is where you don’t understand things as much as you think you do, so structure and the lack of structure, or actuality and possibility. Now how do you mediate between the two. That answer is that you have an instinct for that.”

 

My response: Yes, the individuators would find investigating, discovering, and experiencing reality most engaging as the nexus of chaos and order, possibility and actuality, with no structure and structure. I think we have an instinct on how to mediate this, but I also think we intuitively know we need to use our minds to mediate this rich vein or nexus.

 

Jordan: “And that instinct is meaning. The conversation isn’t so contentious that we’re upset, not so mundane that we are bored. It is right on the border.”

 

My response: Meaning is instinctual and intuitive, but it is also conceptual, rational, and thought expressing ideas with language. This nexus between possibility and actuality is the nexus of polar opposites (contraries and contradictions), and moderate creativity and individual originality abound in this place. This may be that place that Peterson elsewhere alludes to the the Jungian juncture or synchronicity where the story, narrative and metaphysical and value-laden meet the natural or factual world.

 

Jordan: “So the reason we can have this conversation and it is working is you know there are some things you don’t know, and I know that there are some things I don’t know. You’re trying to redeem yourself from your ignorance and your blindness, but you are also trying to redeem yourself from your excessive pride.

 

And your pride would be I know what I am saying. I know what I am doing. It’s like what I know goes. Pride is a sin because it leads you to be a tyrant and it stops you from learning . . .”

 

My response: He sure has adopted the Christian take on pride as the deadliest sin, but he does not accept Christian theology overtly. One should be modest and grateful to God, in a mode of truth and honesty, whether one feels individual pride or humility in what one has achieved or created.

 

 

b.     From 6/4/24: “Dr. Jordan Peterson on Pride Month: We are having this interview in Pride Month so what are my thought about Pride Month. My first thought would be too say you should be very careful what you name things. And pride is not a virtue and I have brought that up with people before. Their objection is that they didn’t really mean pride: they are just trying to affirm their identity.”

 

My response: No Leftists and the LGBTQ crowd pushing Pride Month mean exactly that, a celebration of group pride—they are proud of their group identity, and that is wicked, Luciferian pride.

 

Jordan: “And you know, fair enough, I suppose, to some degree, but that is the name they chose, and that is the name that stuck, and pride is a cardinal sin. There is a reason for that. Pride is something like a stubborn refusal to change when evidence of error is occurring. It is not a good thing. There is a real tinge of narcissism—sexual narcissism—about the whole pride spectacle. And do people have a right to express their sexuality the way they see fit. To some degree if it is consensual and among adults, but generally among human beings with any sense of comportment whatsoever, it is a pretty damn private affair.  We tend to be private in our sexual conduct.”

 

My response: I mostly agree with Jordan about his disgusted reaction to the Pride Month movement, but what he refers to prideful vice and narcissism, is that, but it is group pride more than individual pride.

 

 

c.     Jordan Peterson: “Pride Comes Before a Fall. I don’t see anything arbitrary about that and this is why the bloody postmodernists are so incorrect. There is something like there is an infinite number of interpretations of the world and that is actually true. But then they make a mistake. No interpretation is to be privileged over any other interpretation. Wrong. That is where things go seriously off the rails. The interpretation has to be, and this is the Piagetian objection, if you and I are to play a game: Rule 1 is we both have to want to play. Rule 2 is other people are going to let us play. Rule 3 is we should be able to play it across a pretty long period of time without degenerating. Rule 4 is why we are playing the world shouldn’t kill us.

 

That is why there are no gains like you do not send out your kids to play on the superhighway. Right. They are not playing hockey on the superhighway. That would kill them.

 

There are an infinite number of interpretations but there are not an infinite number of solutions.”

 

My response: Jordan is correct that there are initially an infinite number of interpretations of reality that seem feasible, but to live well is to find a solution, the right, godly, wise way to live, and that eliminates many dead-end interpretations of reality.

 

Jordan: “The solutions are constrained by the facts of the world, suffering in the world and by the facts that we constrain each other. I think that is where that has gone dreadfully, dreadfully wrong. Once I understand the rationale behind that picture—someone worked hard on that—once you understand the rationale behind it—all these people are prostrate at the revelation of the Law. It is no wonder: break the Law and see what happens. Break the universal moral law  and see what happens.

 

I see it all the time as a clinical psychologist. If people have not broken the universal moral law, or someone around them has, it is no joke. You break that law and things go seriously wrong. So no wonder you would be terrified at the structure that governs our being. One of the things about the Old Testament and Nietzsche commented that he was a real admirer of the Old Testament—not so much the New Testament—he thought it was a sin for us to have glued the New Testament onto the Old Testament, which he thought was a really accurate representation of the phenomenology of Being.

 

Stay awake, speak accurately because, be honest or watch the hell out because things will come your way that you just do not want to see at all. It might not just be you but everyone in your culture, demolishing generation after generation. Stay awake and be careful.

 

I think only people do not believe that and they are being hubristic and I think most people know that deep in their hearts. When you get high on your horse, that happens fairly often. If you have any sense you think I had better be careful. I need to tap myself down a fair bit because if I get too puffed up something is going to come along and take me out at the knees.  And everyone knows that and pride comes before the fall.

 

That is why in the Old Testament it says the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. In all my years as a clinical psychologist—and this really terrifies me—I have never seen anyone get away with anything at all even once. There is that old idea that God has a book and keeps track of everything in heaven. Well, okay, okay, maybe it is not a book, fine, but that is really a useful thing to think about.

 

Well, maybe you disagree, maybe you think people get away with things all the time. I have never seen it. What I see instead is someone that twists the fabric of reality and they do it successfully. It does not snap back at them right away but 2 years later they get walloped and think that that is so unfair, so then we track it on this and then this and on this and see where it went wrong because you twisted the fabric of reality. You cannot twist the fabric of reality without it snapping back.”

 

My response: I agree that if one is evil or arrogant and twists the fabric of reality, one will get one’s comeuppance sooner or later, in this world or the next, or in both.

 

Jordan: “It doesn’t work that way and why would it? What are you going to do, twist the fabric of reality? I don’t think so. It is bigger than you. One of the things that really tempts people so they think, I can get away with it. You get away with nothing and that terrifies me.”

 

My response: Only a realistic, alert, good or moral or godly person would be terrified by the realization that we get away with nothing, and that divine justice will be meted out to us.

 

Jordan: “You know ever since last September when it came to    , I worry about making a mistake—I am certainly capable of making a mistake and no one has found out about it.

 

We walk a very thin edge and we are lucky when things are not degenerating around us into chaos or rapidly moving too far, too much order. And it is not an easy thing, hard to stay on that line. You can tell when you stay on that line: things are deeply meaningful and engaging when you are on that line but if you are not existentially terrified of wavering off that line, you are truly not awak and that is what I see in this picture: look out man, because there are rules and you break them, then God help you.”

 

My response: Jordan seems a little grim and gloomy for my taste, but he is correct that the line between evil or chaos on one hand, and order and tyranny on the other hand, is the line we are to walk, the line of meaning and discovery, where the good person is spiritually and ethically engaged in living as meant to as instructed and ordered by the good deities.

 

I just saw a small video about Peterson interviewed about his view of Ayn Rand, and he disputed her view of the world, and indicated that the sin of Luciferian pride was the arrogance of an ideological person pushing her view upon the world and seeking power over others. That sounded right to me, but that is collective pride of a true believer in a mass movement, and it has little to do with being a proud individualist.

 

 

D: Jordan: “Pride is a cardinal sin and there is a reason for that. Pride goes before the fall. I don’t think you should be proud of yourself. I don’t think that the right terminology and I think that is a place where our culture has really fallen off the rails. You should be convinced in your heart that you’re doing the best you can with what you have been given, right?

 

And hopefully that will make you less anxious and more hopeful but you should have the same regard for yourself and someone that you love. It is not pride. It’s the you should, it would be lovely, if you could orient your thoughts to yourself that you could be pleased if you thrived.”

 

My response: Jordan is mistaken as he dismisses all personal pride as evil, negative and a sin against God. What he is warning against that is such wicked pride, when discussed on the level of the particular individual, is only individualistic in discussing group identity from the perspective of the average individual that is a belonger, but not an individualist, the particular individual apart from others in that group. But that individual is one with others, selfless, an ideologue of repulsive, expressive collective arrogance, and that is demonic and a united, mass existential state of rebelling against God. That sinful group pride is not intellectual pride but is more a passionate pride of the true believer or militant sinner.

 

I disagree vehemently with Peterson that almost all adults are not smart enough to feel intellectual and sentimental personal pride in a life well lived, and when the person works hard to contribute to his own welfare, and cares for his family and society. He can and should be proud of his efforts. He need not be arrogant about his accomplishments which are real and based on doing, not talking. He should be modest but not so humble as to be self-humiliating.

 

I often read Louis L’amour western novels for fun, and this morning I came across this quote of his on positive, individualistic self-pride is that positively virtuous, and he could not disagree with Jordan more, and he is right about this type of pride that Jordan does not even acknowledge existing. L’amour is writing of a black cowboy in Montana in the 1870s or 1880s named Eddie Holt.

 

This quote is from L’amour’s novel, Hanging Woman Creek, Page 39: “Eddie I could understand. He was a colored man and he could get a better shake out west than almost anywhere. He might find some folks a bit standoffish . . . some people believe because a man looks different that he feels different; but out on the range a man is judged by how he does his job and stands up to trouble.

 

Me, I wasn’t going to do him no favors. If he did his job, well and good. I couldn’t care what his color was, or even if he had two heads—so long as both of them didn’t eat. I’d already seen him shape up on that trip across the country, and I liked the way he did things. He was a stand up man with pride and strength.”

 

My response: Barnbas Pike, Eddie’s white partner as a cowboy, liked Eddie for his content of character, not the color of his skin. Eddie was a stand-up man of proven courage, decency, competence and industriousness; he was an able boxer, cook, cowboy and fighter, and Eddie had merited pride in his own character and work, and that had not a damn thing to do with Luciferian intellectual pride. L’amour identified in his character Eddie a desirable, human characteristic which correctly, flatly contradicts Peterson’s dismissal of all personal pride as sinful and ungodly. It is just not so.

 

 

 

 

N.

 

 

I wanted to include in my analysis of healthy pride, some thoughts on pride written by Ayn Rand in her ethics book, The Virtue of Selfishness. I will quote her various entries there on pride and then comment as to how close or not we are in our differing conceptions of positive, individual pride. Right off, she is an atheist, so one can be proud as part of the natural world, but I differently, have laid out how we work for the various good divinities in a mode of proper pride and proper humility.

 

 

Page 27: “The virtue of Pride is the recognition of the fact ‘that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining—that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul.’ (Atlas Shrugged) The virtue of Pride can best be described by the term: ‘moral ambitiousness.’ It means one must earn the right to hold oneself as one’s own highest value by achieving one’s own moral perfection—which one achieves by never accepting any code of irrational virtues impossible to practice and by never failing to practice the virtues one knows to be rational—by never accepting an unearned guilt and never earning any, or, if one has earned it, never leaving it uncorrected—by never resigning oneself passively to any flaws in one’s character—by never placing any concern, wish, fear or mood of the moment above the reality of one’s own self-esteem. And, above all, it means one’s rejection of the role of sacrificial animal, the rejection of any doctrine that preaches self-immolation as a moral virtue or duty.”

 

My response: Rand is right in asserting that one can feel proud of oneself only if one works and crafts a set of values to live by, and then strive mightily to live in accordance with one’s adopted values. If one succeeds at these goals, or comes close, then one can feel proud of what one has earned, and this is virtuous pride. The proud woman is morally ambitious, especially if she individuated as her life goal and dedicates that life to the good deities.

 

I am not as opposed to self-sacrifice as she is, of the individual for service to the community, but I qualify that by pointing out necessarily that when most adults maverize, there  is little residual need or the requirement for others to sacrifice themselves for others because the majority of others are excelling on their ow of their own efforts, so there is much reduced call for social assistance, for the majority of citizens to sacrifice their lives, time and resources to rescue the less fortunate unable to care for themselves.

 

Yes, pride is a virtue as Rand insists.

 

 

Pages 39 & 40: Randian associate, Nathaniel Branden wrote extensively about pride: “(4) His life and self-esteem require that man take pride in his power to think, pride in his power to live—but morality, men are taught, holds pride, and specifically intellectual pride, as the gravest of sins. Virtue begins, men are taught, with humility; with the recognition of helplessness, the smallness, the impotence of one’s mind.”

 

My response: Each person must take pride in his power to think and in his power to live so that he is motivated to move, learn, seek, imagine, and grow. This is not offensive to the good deities who are still becoming or maverizing themselves, extending upwards and outwards into an infinitely expanding universe.

 

Branden: “Is man omniscient?—demand the mystics. Is he infallible? Then how he dare challenge the word of God, or of God’s representatives, and set himself up as the judge of anything?”

 

My response: Humans are neither omniscient nor infallible now or ever. God desires, invites, and even demands that we check every word mentioned by anyone, human or divine. We are to judge actions and character but not human souls, for only the good deities are wise enough to fulfill that function. The inquiring mind of a religious seeker is welcome to the good deities.

 

Branden: “Intellectual pride is not –as the mystics preposterously imply it to be—a pretense of omniscience or infallibility. On the contrary, precisely because man must struggle for knowledge, precisely because the pursuit of knowledge requires an effort, the men who assumes this responsibility properly feel pride.

 

Sometimes, colloquially, pride is taken to mean a pretense at accomplishments one has not in fact achieved. But the braggart, the boaster, the man who affects virtues he does not possess, is not proud; he has merely chosen the most humiliating way to reveal his humility.”

 

My response: I agree. Check out how Branden links false pride and boasting to false humility, or self-humiliating.

 

Branden: “Pride is one’s response to one’s power to achieve values, the pleasure one takes in one’s own efficacy. And it is this that the mystic hold as evil.”

 

My response: Human pride in response to one’s power to achieve values, and being pleased with one’s own efficacy need not be negative, or anti-God, but can serve as positive self-reinforcement to keep going, growing, maverizing. If one serves the good deities, this pleasure is good.

 

Branden: “But of doubt, not confidence, is man’s proper moral state; . . .”

 

My response: Doubt is man’s natural moral state of mind, but confidence and earned sense of pride is his desirable state of mind, especially if it is based on his merited accomplishments.

 

Branden” “if self-distrust, not self-reliance, is the proof of his virtue; if fear, not self-esteem is the mark of perfection; if guilt, not pride is his goal—then mental illness is a moral ideal, the neurotics and psychotics are the highest exponents of morality, and the thinkers, the achievers, are the sinners, those who are too corrupt and too arrogant to seek virtue and psychological well-being through the belief that they are unfit to exist.”

 

My response: We need to be positively proud, and we need to be positively humble, and we can serve the good deities and still take pride in our own creations and individuated fabrications, and the gods will approve, if it is done in their names, to extend their kingdom on earth.

 

Branden: “Humility, is, of necessity, is the basic virtue of a mystical morality; it is the only virtue possible to men who have renounced the mind.

 

Pride has to be earned; it is a reward of effort and achievement; but to gain the virtue of humility, one has only to abstain from thinking—nothing else is demanded—and one will feel humble quickly enough.”

 

My response: Branden and Rand are too pro-pride and too anti-humility, and the mystic/religious types are too anti-pride and too pro-humility. Pride does have to be earned and humility should be linked to one’s acceptance that one knows but a little and must remain intellectually ambitious to know more, and to ever suspect that one is guilty or potentially guilt of mental error, arrogance, smugness, deluded thinking and a disinclination to fearlessly, endlessly pursue truth, no matter where it leads one, and what one may have to give up cherished, confirmed biases, in light of new reasons, revelations, discoveries and irrefutable evidence.

 

One should also remain humble in never bragging, boasting, or showing off or building oneself up by putting others’ down. That is rude, and poor manners are inconsistent with feeling morally proud of oneself, that one always treats the good deities, others and oneself with courtesy, diplomatic, measured speech, respect, and dignity.

 

A third way that people need to be humble is as individuating supercitizens. The supercitizen of necessity is a hybrid creature: ½ maverizer and ½ common person, everyday citizen and member of a community somewhere. As a common person, she the supercitizen espouses and lives her life proclaiming and practicing that all adults are her social and political equals, to whom she will never seek to rule over, gain power over or otherwise exalt herself over them as their elite ruler; nor will she abase her by allowing any other to rule her or gain clout over her; she will run her own life, on her own terms, with her making all or most of her decisions.

 

This type of moral, social, and political humility, when popularized and widely practiced and adhered to by supercitizens in the future, will be critically important for social health and harmony. If each person lacks the common touch, it is a sign of her lack of positive humility, and she is obligated to learn how to play this role for her sake and for the sake of the good of the community.

 

Page 65: “Of the various pleasures that man can offer himself, the greatest is pride—the pleasure he takes in his own achievement and in the creation of his own character.”

 

My response: It sound good. When one creates, originates, or builds a business or family, there can be no more legitimate feeling of pleasure than such meaningful effort expended. A loving relationship with God and others would be most pleasing too.

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

 

 

Conclusion and Summary: Jordan Peterson, the wise, good, brilliant Canadian intellectual and psychologist has adopted Judeo-Christian bias against all pride as sinful and vicious. What he seems to identify as negative pride is negative pride, but he misidentifies this sinful, negative group pride as individual pride.

 

My project in this very lengthy blog entry on pride is to latch onto the kind of positive pride identified by L’amour and Rand, and to see if it can be made compatible with Judaism and Christianity. It is a hard sell because, Yahweh, Jesus, the prophets and many of the great doctors and saints of the Catholic Church came out against pride as the deadliest sin, and Jordan Peterson is in complete agreement with them.

 

I love and respect Jesus and Yahweh—as I do all good deities—and I do not want to offend them or their followers as I suggest we move altruistic morality and this pathological warning against the dangers of personal pride down from the moral  pedestal of primacy into a more minor ethical positioning—still important if less emphasized--while elevating an egoist morality with a promotion of positive, healthy pride and merited self-regard, modestly lived and modestly modeled, as how a holy and ethical Jew, Christian, secular atheist, or any human should comport herself.

 

I apologize to any good deities or their followers if I seem anti-God, anti-traditional religion, or nihilistic: none of those are my aims, or I believe, to be the consequence to the reforms which I bring to religion and Western thought. I seek the truth above all things, and a proper sense of personal pride and egoist morality will uplift all, and should replace no good deity, or seek in any way to dislodge them from high places of honor and admiration.

 

It seems to me that people naturally hate themselves and suffer from low self-esteem; they humble themselves every day, which really is a process of self-degrading and self-destruction. When people are groupist, they are naturally self-humbling in an excessive and unhealthy way. Being slapped around everyday makes them resent suffering needlessly, but then they group-live and lie to themselves sin group pride and then we have a world of hurt, lies, anger and bitterness, and this demonic sea is what people are immersed in.

 

Their pride and their humility are twisted self-expressions, and it produces mangled, shattered, low-functioning adults. If we want to hurt people and make them fail, we could not have devised a better way to tear people up and guarantee that they will fail, and we are growing evil in the world, and this is pridelessness that Peterson has misindentified as individualist intellectual pride. Individual intellectual pride is the cardinal virtue, especially when an individuators serving a good deities so self-regards and so practices maverization, and this chief virtue has been mislabeled as the cardinal vice. Poor humans have never stood a chance.

 

We want humans to be proud, but based on merit and worth, truthfully evidenced, and we want people to be humble as individuals too, and always, always people are to conduct themselves with modesty, not showing off, nor allowing others to show off, nor denigrating the self nor denigrating others, or associating with others that denigrate themselves or their neighbor.