ABSTRACT
Cheating is not simply a matter for the stage or the gambling casino or even the battlefield but is, rather, a regular if recognized aspect of the everyday world. The maneuvers of guile fall under the rubrics of hiding and showing. Like every other human activity, business attracts the cheat, and as in every form of cheating there is hiding and showing. The difference between business cheating and the con is essentially that the con has fashioned an opportunity at one remove from real life, a bet on probabilities, a throw at a carnival, a game in reality structured without chance. There have always been a few, and at times many, who have felt that at best organized religion was structured self-deception and at worst a fraud. The true believers who worshipped the sliver of the true cross did not seem to care that in all of Western Europe there were sufficient slivers to reconstruct many true crosses.
