Left and woke: different words for the same sin

Under yesterday’s video, commenter @donaldist7321 wrote about man who “replaced God with himself, like all these woke people do.”

I’ll be honest, it was a bit painful to read it put so bluntly. It’s painful because it’s true and simple. I felt helpless. If we could solve this, we would solve most of humanity’s problems.

The term “replacing God with oneself” in essence describes what Christians call pride. Pride is not only one of the seven deadly sins, pride is the super-sin.

All other sins follow pride like the cart follows the horse. All his sins follow the prideful like the stench follows the unwashed.

If I were the devil and wanted to destroy a human spiritually, destroy a society, destroy the Church, or even bring the whole of humanity to my own wretched levels, I would simply teach them pride.

First I would give pride new, innocuous names, like “individualism” (which actually once was a slur by Tocqueville), or “feminism,” or “self-care.” I would let them celebrate their own fall and make them call it “freedom.”

So, how do we recognize pride? Well, the devil himself, the snake that he is and always was, seduced Eve with pride’s sweet promises:

For God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil.

– Genesis 3:5

You shall be “as Gods.” You, mortal creature, consider yourself “as God,” but not by creating the sunrise or the stars. You—often implicitly—consider yourself a God simply by deciding for yourself what good and evil are.

You decide on a whim. You let your gut feeling decide what is right and wrong, but your gut is bloated with foul gas.

You have been warned:

for pride is the beginning of all sin: he that holdeth it, shall be filled with maledictions, and it shall ruin him in the end.

– Ecclesiasticus 10:15

So, how should I guard myself against pride?

I would start with, yes, a bit of self-awareness: Do I consider something to be true just because it was me who said it? Do I consider something morally right just because it feels good and change would be uncomfortable?

That’s pride holding me by the throat.

We have known since Baudelaire that the greatest lie the devil ever taught was that he doesn’t exist. But the first and most fatal lie was that pride was freedom.

It’s pride or freedom. Your choice.