Masquerade

Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.

6. Masquerade
La Rochenfoucauld: “Hypocrisy is an homage that vice pays to virtue.”

The Mask of Sanity
Psychopaths are often intelligent, attractive, and charismatic. They wear the mask of a genial and trustworthy human being, but underneath it everything is self-protective chaos.
The lack of a sense of guilt is both dangerous and deviant.
To do its worse evil must look its best. Vices have to masquerade as virtues. Satan must appear as an angel of light.
Most people seek at least the form of godliness while denying its power. They do not want to be good but merely appear to be good.
Evil people are simultaneously aware of their evil and desperately trying to resist that awareness.

A Public Resistance Movement
For the educational elite, moral tolerance is the only good, and moral intolerance the only evil.
Self-Swindling
Self-deception is a shadowy phenomenon by which we pull the wool over some part of our own psyche.
Self-deception is “corrupted consciousness. First we deceive ourselves and then we convince ourselves that we are not deceiving ourselves.”
When we are most religious we my be most at risk of losing touch with God.
There is a vast difference between the truth of religion and the use of religion.
Many believers do not really believe in God but merely some deified image of themselves.
Even when we are at worship the wolves may be howling in our souls.