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Jul
21

Your conscience: Garbage in, garbage out

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Jen at "Et tu?" posted a response to Annie, a commenter in her blog, who wrote,

To me, it's scary to think I live in the world with people who believe this way. To think only your belief in God is what keeps you from being a bad person? You have no human decency? You have no compassion? You only have your belief in a man in the sky to keep you from doing wrong?

That's scary to the rest of us who live on secular humanism and empathy, based in something much stronger and much more sound.

This quote illustrates the great conceptual divide that believers and atheists face. I could have written almost the same thing:

To think only your belief in secular humanism is what keeps you from being a bad person? You have no human decency? You have no compassion? You only have your belief in some abstract bit of sophism to keep you from doing wrong?

That's scary to the rest of us who live in service to God and our faith, based on something much stronger and much more sound.

If I were to say that, I would just be talking past Annie, the same way she is just talking past me. The real truth is that both of us try to do good because they are internalized values.

The handy-dandy behavioral template


When I make one of my dozens of mundane moral decisions, I don't stop to think consciously, "What would be the best way to serve God? What does the man in the sky want me to do?" Anybody who did this would be paralyzed in pondering, unable to make decisions when they need to.

Instead, like everybody else, when I make a decision I just consult my conscience (as I discussed in this post). That's my internal set of moral values, and it provides quick answers. When Annie makes a moral decision, I daresay she also just consults her conscience.

That's what the conscience is there for — making quick moral decisions.

My faith is not going anywhere, but if it were to falter, I would not suddenly begin operating amorally, because my faith is not directly the source of my decisions. It's what shaped and formed that behavioral template, my conscience, and the conscience does not change shape as easily or quickly as mere belief can. Likewise, were Anna to abandon secular humanism, she would likely not suddenly begin acting like Machiavelli. Her philosophy formed her conscience.

Based on her blog, I suspect that Annie, like most of us, has met Christians who do not behave as Christians are "supposed" to behave. This contradiction does not happen because the bad actors do not "really" believe in God. It's because they have not shaped their "motivators," their consciences, according to their belief in God.

Probably a great number of them have done little to shape their consciences at all. A conscience is like a computer — you have to make sure you feed it well. Garbage in? Garbage out.

Comments (2)

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If I'm understanding you correctly, you're basing your conclusion on an Aristotelian understanding of virtue acquisition from an external source. I'm not disagreeing with you, since acquisition is a very real part of how we form our consciences, but I'm also of the opinion that we're dealing with something that rises from within, as well. Something along the model of recollection, more of a Plato thing, is essentially at the core of what we understand as Natural Law...at least the way I understand it. If Natural Law is hard-wired into the created order, and Man is part of the created order, then there is something at the core of conscience that is intrinsic and not acquired.

Like I said, I'm not disagreeing with you...this doesn't change the independence of conscience from belief in God; I'm just trying to get a bigger picture of how you approach the conscience.
I'm trying to emphasize in this post how a conscience must be well-formed to be reliable. But I don't think a conscience is a tabula rasa before it is formed, or we would not see a lot of similarities in behavior we consider moral among cultures. Perhaps just as one's moral beliefs form one's moral template (conscience), it also goes the other way. Maybe we start out with certain moral guidelines imprinted on our consciences which then affect our belief systems.

I do think that any belief in the goodness of people implies the existence of an objective moral good, and the Judeo-Christian tradition identifies that good with God. In fact, the English words "good" and "God" have the same etymology. So in my opinion, a belief in essential human goodness is inconsistent with strict atheism.

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