Anything You Can Do...

That there is even such a thing as “human nature” is debatable. But if it in fact does exist, the universality of rivalry must certainly be an inherent human characteristic. An incredibly fine line separates rivalry from enmity, which may help to explain why human competitiveness often spills over into violence. Prejudice, bigotry, discrimination on the basis of class; all have their roots in the human propensity for one-upmanship. The Christian gospels even record that rivalry erupted among Jesus’ disciples. This may seem not to have anything to do with my current expose on the Tri-Church Parish, but in truth competitive rivalry played a significant and counterproductive role in the way the three congregations got along, just as it plagued the denominations to which they belonged. If we ever wonder why cooperation is such a scarcity, I think that we have to look no further than our own personal aspirations to be Number One.