Why pride is the worst sin

Pride is often considered a negative force in human existence—the opposite of humility and a source of social friction. But is it? She argues that pride, like other human emotions, is part of our evolutionary heritage, helping us to survive and thrive in cooperative societies by inspiring us to be the best humans we can be.

The pride display—chest out, head back, and a slight smile—is recognizable in cultures around the world, she adds, connoting status, encouraging deference from others, and motivating us to work hard to gain approval from our communities. She recounts results from several research studies to help demonstrate the ways pride impacts us behaviorally and socially.

In one study , participants were experimentally induced to feel pride by being told that their scores on a rather boring cognitive test were especially high.

Later, those students voluntarily worked on an unrelated problem set twice as long as the students who were not induced to feel pride for the same scores, suggesting that pride motivated them to persevere. According to Tracy, children and adults will seek knowledge from people who show pride displays, because proud people are assumed to have expertise underlying their pride.

Therefore, pride helps to drive cultural learning, because it helps us figure out who can teach us about our world. As Thomas A. In fact, what throughout history has been recognized as the deadliest of vices is now almost celebrated as a virtue in our culture.

But let us remember, "A day is coming when human pride will be ended and human arrogance destroyed. Then the LORD alone will be exalted. We would love to hear what you think about the content on Pulse. Welcome to the Pulse Community! We will now be sending you a daily newsletter on news, entertainment and more. Also join us across all of our other channels - we love to be connected! Authors: Inemesit Udodiong. We have an obligation of justice and charity to our fellows—including the pre-born, the elderly, the sick and the weak.

Saints and sages have always said that the uprooting of pride begins with humility—simply a telling of the truth about God and about ourselves. When I write next, I will review some words to live by. In our fresh look at the 7 Deadly Sins, we now consider the deadliest of them all. Pride is the worst of sins because it involves a full-scale inversion of reality Pride is delusional, spiteful, bitter.

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We need you. While there are positive elements of high self-esteem—for example, there is a correlation between high self-esteem and happiness—Dennis Ockholm points out in his book, Dangerous Passions, Deadly Sins that there is a dark side to self-esteem, which he calls self-esteemia.

He summarizes some of the findings of the research:. And this is what gives pride its deadly force. Pride inevitably sets us in direct opposition to God. The most dangerous form of pride is spiritual pride.

This again takes many forms. Our spiritual devotion, our spiritual attainments, even the overcoming of a sin in our life, can easily lead us to think of ourselves as being spiritually mature, on better terms with God because of our spiritual success rather than because of His grace—in the process implying that we have progressed beyond the need for grace and so we can approach God on our own merits or even as a colleague or equal.

To the ancient monks who studied these sins, this was the most alarming aspect of pride: it turned genuine spiritual successes into occasions for sin because they could move us to think more highly of ourselves than we should. The more we mature in our faith, the more consistently we live it out, the closer we grow to God, the more we are in danger of falling into spiritual pride. Consider: what gives humanity its unique dignity?

Similarly, Jesus immediately links the command to love God with the command to love our neighbor, and then explains in the parable of the Good Samaritan that your neighbor includes even those your culture considers inferiors or enemies.

Or we can turn to 1 John, where we are told that anyone who does not love his neighbor whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. To put it simply, whenever you place any characteristic ahead of the image of God in determining human worth—whether race or gender or education or ability or disability or wealth or fame or political or social affiliations or religion … anything —you are literally insulting God to His face.

Pride that sets us over others also sets us in direct opposition to the God in whose image they were made.