# How to detect pride?



## neo-puritan (Feb 16, 2004)

One of the key ideas of Puritanism was that people usually do not see their sins; a person can be proud, envious, vain, quarrelsome and greedy, but he is not aware of anything wrong with himself. This &quot;blindness&quot; logically led to the idea that the first task in making people religious was getting them to notice that they indeed were totally corrupted by sins. Puritans accomplished this by providing very detailed descriptions of sins and virtues which people could use to investigate their thoughts, emotions and actions for signs of corruptions such as pride and envy. Examples of this literature can be seen in Baxter's long discussion of pride and, on a more general level, in Richard Bernard's &quot;The Legal Proceedings in Man-shire Against Sinne.&quot;

Does anybody know of a modern treatise of pride sufficiently nuanced to be used as a manual for introspective self-investigation of this sin? I have not been able to find anything. In fact, the search produced results that were worse than just &quot;drawing a blank&quot;: many modern theologians have embraced psychobabble, and much of their talk about self-esteem seemed awfully close to an advocacy of pride.


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## Gregg (Feb 16, 2004)

I'm somewhat proud of the quick and low cost dinner I prepared tonight.:biggrin:


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## Me Died Blue (Feb 17, 2004)

This kind of relates to your question...it's a way I thought of combating pride once I find it in myself. I've found it works well, with me anyway. For awhile, I struggled with the issue of pride frequently. I had already come to loathe it and couldn't stand when I found it in myself, which was so often. Then one day I realized that whenever I found myself being prideful, realizing that alone was enough to remove any pride I might have had! If you're able to make yourself hate pride in and of itself enough, then whenever you find it in yourself and have difficulty trying to get rid of it, just the realization of how prideful you're being should be enough to humble you again!

It's kind of like an ontological technique for combating pride. I still don't know how I realized that, one day I just noticed it.


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