pious fraud

Philip has wisely taken my advice, and employed pious fraud.

Hunt believed the fire to be a pious fraud which brought Christianity into disrepute.

If the intention is to create "proof" for religious history, it is pious fraud.

He called the retraction story a "pious fraud."

Pious fraud but quite right: otherwise they'd have one old booser worse than another coming along, cadging for a drink.

Come off it, you pious fraud!

Historians generally regard these legends as "pious fraud" produced during the Middle Ages.

"As a prophet, Poor Richard Saunders is a pious fraud.

He blames "the Roman church" for many abuses in the world and accuses it of "pious frauds".

They had been a pious fraud, a device to stimulate Tappy into a state where the Imago would manifest itself.

Many literary forgeries have been pious frauds, perpetrated in the interests of a church, a priesthood, or a dogma.

The people accepted the pious fraud with the maddest enthusiasm, and Brigham's power was sealed and secured for all time.

Pious fraud (Latin: pia fraus) is used to describe fraud in religion or medicine.

Ross Perot does not care who wins, so long as he can get even with the media for having exposed him last summer as a pious fraud.

It is quite possible that it has always been what I say it is now, a pious fraud to baffle outsiders!"

A pious fraud to scare Keepers into keeping their virginity, a bogeyman to frighten babies and girl-children!"

She cut the love-scenes, interpolated passages in praise of female celibacy, and was guilty of other glaring pious frauds.

The Novian said, "That's typical pious fraud, Ladislas.

I'd thus surround you with an impenetrable legend of conscientious misrepresentation, a circle of pious fraud, and all the while privately keep you for myself."

Monasteries, at that time, were masters of the pia fraus, the "pious fraud" of falsifying documents to match a dead benefactor's supposed intent.

I could not discover whether my aunt, in her last short conversation with me, had fallen on a pious fraud, or had really mistaken the state of my mind.

Scientific skeptics and atheists generally consider both religious and secular séances to be scams, or at least a form of pious fraud, citing a lack of empirical evidence.

Cleindori proved it, even before she left Arilinn, she would have freed the Keepers from laws she had found to be pious frauds, meaningless and superstitious lies!

That pious fraud, M. Seymour Lanson, President of the United States, delivered a flowery speech; the old figurehead was an artist at his one function, speechmaking.

Perhaps M. de Roquelaure merely had recourse to what casuists call a pious fraud in order to engage the married couple to do that which he congratulated them on having already done.