The Conscience
The concept of conscience and its function
Conscience is a voice God placed in man to be a guide before action and a judge after it; it has two functions: guidance and judgment. Before the existence of written law people acted by their conscience, and conscience is an internal standard to know good and evil.
Degrees and types of conscience
There is a good conscience whose judgments agree with the word of God, and a perverted conscience that thinks good is evil and evil is good. There is a scrupulous conscience that imagines sin where there is none, and a negligent conscience that does not care about others. Consciences differ from person to person according to knowledge, faith, intellect, emotion, heredity and environment.
The positive and negative work of conscience
A sound conscience does not only refrain from condemning negatives, but it also reproves a person if he is deficient in doing good or does not strive for perfection. Also conscience can justify actions when desires and passions dominate the mind, so a person needs awareness to prevent intellectual justification of the sin.
Influence of external and internal factors
Knowledge, education, religion, books, guidance, public opinion and the environment affect the formation of conscience. Likewise emotion and love affect the conscience’s judgment toward relatives and loved ones, and sometimes the spirit of the group excites the conscience so an individual’s behavior changes in the crowd.
Training and sanding (refining) the conscience
Conscience needs education and polishing through family upbringing, religious education, sermons and reading; especially teaching children to distinguish what belongs to them and what belongs to others and to respect rights. Parents must teach prohibition of wrong and encourage doing good.
Beware of distortions and justifications
A person must beware of justifying his desires with the mind, and of blind obedience driven by other consciences or customs. The straight conscience is that which does not deviate to the right or the left and seeks the whole truth honestly before God.
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