guilt avoidance. By accumulating a record of this kind of superfluous piety you can deceive yourself into thinking that you're compensating for any real sins that you may have committed. It's quite illogical, of course. You can never really make up for anything by subsequent penances of this sort. It's like going to the magistrate and saying, 'Yes, I did drive at 100 mph down the High Street yesterday. But unlike some people I never park on a double yellow line. Surely you can take that into consideration.'
Yet there are thousands of religious people whose minds work essentially in that fallacious fashion, preoccupied with the trivial details of their lives in a desperate attempt to camouflage, and compensate for, a formidable monster of moral corruption that they know secretly lurks within. Some men take great pride in the fact that they don't smoke or drink, others are perfectionists in their hobbies, or workaholics in their careers. Some women are fanatically house-proud. They try to purge their conscience by liberal use of disinfectant in the bathroom. And of course there are those endless numbers of religious people who salve their consciences by attending church, giving money to charity, saying prayers, and so on. There's a certain kind of obsessive personality that enjoys ritual, discipline, self-denial, and that sort of thing. An ascetic, puritanical lifestyle is a form of self-indulgence for them.
And that's what the Pharisees were like. All such behaviour is driven by the desire to avoid guilt. By concentrating on the observance of petty rules and regulations which we set ourselves—rules which, though irksome, we know we can fully keep if we really try—our attention is diverted from God's big rules, with regard to which our obedience can never be satisfactory and which therefore provide us with an inexhaustible source of potential moral anxiety.
Third, he majors on comparative obedience. 'I am not', the
