The essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and other vices are mere flea bites in comparison. It was pride that made the devil the devil. Pride leads to every other vice as it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
If you want to find out how proud you are, the easiest way is to ask yourself, "How much do I dislike being snubbed or not being recognized?" The point is each person's pride is in competition with everyone else and their pride.
I wanted to be the big noise at the party and so now I am annoyed at someone else being the big noise. Two of a trade never agree. Pride is competitive by its very nature while other vices are competitive by accident.
Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, rather it gets pleasure out of having more of it than the next man. It is the comparison that makes a man proud, the pleasure of being above the rest.Taking it a step further, pride is what allows men to say "no" to God. Yielding our way to God is the path to wisdom and peace. It doesn't matter whether it is the skeptic or the religious. Both have set up their own idea of God. Every man has a mental image of who God is or isn't. Pride in self is dangerous because it can go either direction: Pride allows one man to say, "There is no God and you Theists are silly" or Pride allows another man to say "I please God with all the good I do and it's a shame you don't do what I do, tsk, tsk."
Lewis continues
Pride has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and generation since the world began. Other vices may bring people together but pride always brings enmity. Not only enmity between men, but enmity to God.
In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that, and therefore know yourself as nothing in comparison, you don't know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and of course, as long as you're looking down, you cannot see something above you.
That raises a terrible question: How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I'm afraid it means the are worshiping an imaginary God.I've been told man has made imaginary gods to cope with life, to find some assurance that this life isn't all there is and to have a big daddy in the sky. Of course, these things could be said just as easily to those who don't believe: You don't believe because you can't deal with judgment, you want to live forever on your own terms and you had daddy issues.
However, that isn't the point. The point is why would Christians have made up a God like this one? One who judges, demands perfection, calls most of what we do sin and asks for our hearts? Wouldn't it make more sense to make up a God who, at the end of the day, just wanted all to have a good time? No, this 'imaginary' God isn't anything we could have imagined.
Think about it, skeptics already have issues with this imaginary God and his demands...you don't think I'd like to change the rules a bit myself? Even so, I can't wrap my mind around God's ways and his moral objectives. But I do trust him. If that makes me a rube, I'll be one all day long. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 4 the same.
Conversely, the religious people have an imaginary God, too. Jesus spoke to them daily and called them out on their idea of who God was. Just as the skeptic will be surprised, so will the religious. I'd venture most of us will be surprised when we come face to face with God. All the same, atheists take some heat, but Jesus spent more time putting it to the religious folk. That should bring some comfort to the skeptic who struggles with the authority and submission. They might be closer to the kingdom than they know.
Lewis continues writes of these religious folks
They theoretically admit to themselves to be nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time imagining how He approves of them and thinks them far better than ordinary people. That is, they pay a pennyworth of imaginary humility to Him and get out of it a pound's worth of Pride towards their fellow men.Yes, many are worshiping an imaginary God, one they made up in their own minds. Likewise, many who don't believe in God have bowed down to an imaginary god called "self". Don't believe it? Take a look around at those who don't believe in God. What have they set up as the arbiter for their lives? Self, masked in self satisfaction of 'science having the answers' as if 'science' were one monolithic entity. What kind of science, what discipline and without bias?
Others have chosen the spiritual buffet, mixing and matching different world views until it becomes digestible to themselves. Still others have decided that they will worship God in their own way and be satisfied that the good they have done outweighs the bad, yet unable to actually give a definition of good and bad that is transcendent.
Finally, Lewis offers a simple test for us regarding pride
The real test of being in the presence of God is that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether.I leave you with Isaiah, when coming face to face with God in Isaiah 6
