Pretty much as you described
@SalixIncendium.
Second question first:
What does your religion or worldview teach you about pride? Do you adhere to these teachings? Why or why not?
Pride, in its '
vainglorious' form of an “
inordinate [excessive] desire to excel or perception that one does excel" over other people, was described by Pope St. Gregory the Great as the father and foundation for all other sins. In his
Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas cited the Book of Ecclesiasticus to opine that pride “…
is the beginning of every sin.” (ST, I-II, 84.2)
In the church's tradition, therefore, pride is often associated with the devil and the first sin:
"Who does not know that kings and dukes had their rulership from those who, not knowing God, strove from blind greed and intolerable presumption to dominate their equals, namely mankind, by pride...urged on by the ruler of the world, i.e., the devil?…
Therefore all Christians who desire to reign with Christ should be warned not to strive to rule through ambition of worldly power…"
(Pope Gregory VII in 1081: 552; see also Poole 1920: 201, fn. 5)
In his Introduction to the Devout Life, St. Francis de Sales (1567 – 1622) pretty much answers (from my perspective) your first question.
Does it make sense to be proud of something you were born into and are with no effort on your part? If so, how? What does such pride accomplish?
He writes on so-called 'vainglorious pride':
"Vainglory is the glory that we give ourselves; either for what is not really in us, or for what is in fact in us but not owing to anything we did, or for what is in us and owing to us but which does not deserve to be the cause of a boast…. There are those who are proud and haughty because they ride a magnificent horse or because their hat sports a fancy feather, or because they are wearing some fashionable clothing. Who does not see the folly here? If there is glory due, it belongs to the horse, the bird or the tailor! And what a pitiable heart is his who expects esteem because of a horse, a feather or some lace!"
This is why Jesus set a different exemplar of supreme humility for others to follow:
"....Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.
4 Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. 5
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,6 who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
7 but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
8 he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of
death—
even death on a cross.
9 Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name that is above every name..."
(Philippians 2:3-9)
This ancient Christological hymn embedded within Paul's epistle to the church in Philippi, describes how the preexistent, eternally divine Christ freely relinquished his position of equality with God, "
emptying" himself by taking on the bodily form of a human peasant, the son of a carpenter and submitting himself to a slave's death on the cross, as an example to the rest of humanity. For this act of profound humility, God exalts his name above every name (according to the incarnational myth).
Paul thus invites his reader's to consider an existential question by reflecting upon this 'mythic' narrative: if someone pre-existing in the “
form of God” could humbly abdicate his 'divinity' so as to take on a lowly human form in self-abegnatinf service to other people - living among lepers, prostitutes and others at the bottom of the human social hierarchy - and suffer the death of a condemned criminal in order to demonstrate his self-giving love for humankind, can the Philippian Christians really be justified in not exhiniting a similar humility in their daily lives? Shouldn't they too abandon all "
selfish ambition and conceit", so that the same humble mind of Christ might be in them?
I certainly do try to follow Christ's example and teaching as the model for my own life, as I believe 'vainglorious' pride to be a social sin that not only damages oneself psychologically but can harm other people around us as well, given that it amounts to a deluded egocentrism rather than an altruistic attitude.
