Pride (cross-archive-excerpt)

Anyway, I listened to a reading of The Great Sin, a chapter in Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis (on my to-read-very-soon list). Wow. Ouch. It's about pride.
"There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves."
uh huh. more later.
"...Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind. ...Pride is essentially competitive - is competitive by its very nature... Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it that the next man. ... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. ...power is what Pride really enjoys: there is nothing makes a man feel so superior to others as being able to move them about like toy soldiers..."
this made me think of a picture. Hard to explain... Each man who rejects God is in essence saying he is God. Now, picture to yourself a worse war than all the epic Greek tales of the skirmishes of the gods and goddesses put together. Their fight for power was tame. But we humans? It's a bloody war. No one can stand being a lesser god. And we're so fighting madly against our fellow man, and against God.

This was a comforting confirmation of what I hinted at in my "To Know God" post.
"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 am afraid it means they are worshipping an imaginary God. They theoretically admit themselves to be nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time imagining how He approves of them..."

And finally (although I would love to continue quoting!): "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."
uh-huh.