(September 24, 2022 at 6:21 pm)Duty Wrote: Yet I feel/think/deduce that having pride in one's deeds and behaviour is central and fundamental to living a decent life. No pride = fail, basically.
And you have a point, but CS Lewis probably didn't come up himself with the idea to snub pride. I mean, you already had seven cardinal sins proclaimed by Pope Gregory I in the 7th century.
These seven cardinal sins were nothing but arbitrary taboos. And he certainly wanted to forbid them to subdue people better. Like anger, which meant the ability to recognize the injustice of a tyrannical papacy and respond with hostility; or envy, meaning the ambition that led humans to emulate the flight of birds and the comfort of the ruling classes; or gluttony, meaning the desire to eat as well as the clergy; or greed, meaning the desire to own private property at a time when the Catholic church wanted to be the world’s only capitalist; etc.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
