Mark claimed to be a religious man, so he surely knew that pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.
When someone starts telling me how religious they are, I immediately place one hand over my wallet and the other hand over my ass - because I know they are going to try and empty the one while shoving it up the other.
Hindsight has taught me this lesson in business: the more quickly someone professes their Christianity, the faster I should have run away from them. The times I have been screwed over, it was done by people claiming to be Christians.
The worst boss that I ever had was a self-professed Christian who took a very Jesuit view of things and told me straight out after he had used me as a scapegoat, blaming me for a decision that I had vigorously advised against, that he was more important than me, so sacrificing me was morally justified and that he did so with a clear conscience.
Several months after I had left that job, the person who succeeded me reached out and told me that he had been fired for a decision his boss had made. This guy had come to me when he was interviewing for my old job and asked me about the boss, so I told him that if anything went wrong, he, the new guy, would be blamed, but if there was a success, the boss would take credit for it and tell the higher ups that he had had to personally intervene to turn a potential failure into a success. The new guy said that I sounded like sour grapes, so I shrugged and told him good luck. He didn't last 6 months and had given up a less demanding job with comparable pay to take my previous job because it had more professional growth potential. I guess that he failed to factor in the risks associated with a Jesuit minded boss.
