Pride vs. Confidence

Christianity requires the laying down of pride. Many interpret this to be a sacrifice of confidence. It is sacrificing confidence, but sacrificing confidence in something not worthy of it, and building confidence in Someone that is worthy of it. When you recognize that your confidence is in an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent, perfectly just, and perfectly merciful God, you will have a renewed confidence in yourself. But, if your confidence in God goes below the confidence in yourself (pride) again, you will have to make the sacrifice again. The Christian must never over-estimate his capabilities, or under-estimate God's. There is a delicate balance of self-confidence versus trust in God in the Christian's life. Sacrificing our own pride has to be done constantly, because we are still sinful and always default to making God less in our lives and ourselves more. To be a Christian requires the humble desire and duty to make God more and ourselves less.

Culture's Obsession With Self-Help

Naturalism devalues humans to the point of being of equal value to dirt or having no value at all (neither does dirt, really; see short series "Human Equality and Naturalism"). This has created a psychological crisis of self-confidence. The culture has proposed what it thinks to be the answer...beauty, muscles, money, status, titles, power, education, "causes". People strive for these things constantly to the point of being obsessed, because they want to establish their value and be worthy of confidence (from themselves or other people).

This is self-defeating. If humanity has little or no value, why is confidence in humanity (thus, one's self) so important? In order to make life even seem like it is worth living (considering all the suffering involved), naturalism tells us that we have to place value on ourselves. Yet we know that that kind of value cannot simply be stated to be true- there must exist some foundation for the value, then it can be stated to be true. People will try to establish the foundation the way that naturalism offers (given above), but they do figure out that a foundation based on those things is only as strong as the value that culture places on them. Unfortunately, culture is fickle and changes what it believes to hold value constantly. When one person builds their value based on one thing, its value changes to being useless. All that time, effort, and resources were wasted, because their confidence is based on a value level, that is based on a foundation of relative value, that is based on a culture synonymous with A.D.D.