I did a post on gluttony a while back about how it often felt like the forgotten sin. I still think that, but I’m starting to think there might be one even more overlooked..

Pride.

Pride comes in a lot of forms, but the one I mainly want to talk about is the view of moral superiority. It’s rampant and we’re all guilty of it at sometimes, but I feel like it’s taking over the internet by storm.

People can talk about Instagram and envy till the cows come home, but I want to talk about people shaming others, blasting others, and pushing themselves up by pushing others down. It’s a school yard trick that’s gotten a much bigger audience with social media. It’s the constant “Actually you’re wrong and I can tell you why, because I’m right” not about one topic or two topics, but every topic all the time. Our views are firm, unmoving, and only the people who agree with us are worth listening too.

And for the record, I’m not just talking about politics. I’m talking about everything from people arguing the best way to feed a baby to the best way to teach a English class. Our views are viewed as the supreme in all subjects, and we’re willing to fight to the death about it. It’s not necessarily a new cultural shift, but it’s something we need to talk about because it’s starting to seep into every aspect of our lives.

It’s not just about the complete lack of wanting to listen to people who disagree with you, it’s also about the complete unwillingness to care about them as humans. I see this a lot within religious groups too, especially on social media. We’re all sinners, the Bible teaches us that no sin is bigger than another in the eyes of God, but of course that doesn’t seem to apply to the people hate-posting about other groups because those sins couldn’t possibly compare to theirs. It’s like they’ve completely forgotten about pride all together, and that the mere act of viciously yelling at someone for the splinter in their eye doesn’t give you a log in your own. We’re supposed to be about compassion. What happened to leading people out of the dark while acknowledging our own mistakes and making that path one we take together?

Of course I’m not immune to this, none of us are, whether your pride is about one thing or another, we all find ourselves at some point making our moral code the “right” moral code. It’s a dangerous game to think your always right, because we all get proven wrong. It can cause your whole world to come crashing down if you let it, but it causes more damage to other people than it does to ourselves. Pride is seriously harming our society. It’s harming how we talk to one other and how we listen.

We shouldn’t let one thing control us as much as we do. Whether you’re religious or not, whatever your view on sins is, I think we can all come to the agreement that pride more often than not stands in our way.

Let’s focus on the type of pride we feel after doing something good, after completing a difficult task, or helping someone rather than the type of pride we feel by being right.