The Conscience

 

I was listening to Dennis Prager on the radio yesterday. He surprised me when he claimed that people do not have consciences. That seemed counterfactual to me. I believe that we all have consciences and that is the moral inner voice or the capacity to hear from the self when we go astray or might go astray, and that voice might be receiving communication from God or our guardian angel.

 

 Jordan Peterson believes we all have a conscience, a feeling or voice inside of us that warns us what not to do that is immoral or foolish, and we feel guilty when we go ahead and go against our conscience, and do the bad behavior and feel guilty about it afterwards. Peterson mentions that the conscience has been compared to the superego (that internalized voice of authority and society to guide our moral choices) and that conscience is that in part: it is also this biological, natural, subconscious inner voice, that is socioculturally triggered and shaped, but it the innate capacity to exercise as a voice of caution, an inner moral sense. Peterson opines that we all have a conscience but no psychologist knows exactly what it is.

 

Let me go back to Prager: he wrote his weekly column, posted yesterday (1/10/2023) at Townhall.com, and the article was about humans and their consciences. I would like to look at the article and quote it in places and then comment on it.

 

Prager commences by offering a dictionary definition of conscience as ‘a person’s moral sense of right and wrong, viewed as acting as a guide to one’s behavior.’ That definition seems largely accurate to me.

 

Let me quote Prager: “Whenever I make the common-sense argument that people need to hold themselves accountable to a morality-giving, morality-judging God—specifically, the God of the Bible, and more specifically, the God of the Ten Commandments—a flood of incredulous, frequently mocking, responses immediately appears in the comments section and on atheist and left-wing websites.

 

The gist of the God-is-morally-unnecessary argument is this: ‘Unlike Prager and other religious people, I don’t need God to tell me murder is wrong. My conscience tells me that. I don’t answer to any god; I answer to my conscience.”

 

I recommend that it is a false choice to urge people to choose to obey their conscience, their secularly derived superego, or some inner voice from God whispering moral tips to us, dos and don’ts for how to choose and live.

 

Whether it is our superego chiding us, or the direct voice from an angel whispering to us, both and either are our consciences talking to us, prodding us to behave, and making us feel guilty when we sin.

 

God exists and there is no existential or moral free ride in this world. We are and will be accountable to God—and to a lesser extent to our parents, community, the authorities, and our peers—for our behavior. I do not see that it is an either/or choice: either we are secular and sinful because conscience as superego guides us, or we listen to God directing us through De’s inner voice talking internally to us.

 

Prager continues: “This response is held most widely among the best educated—i.e., the people most likely to reject the existence of God and the necessity of both God and the Bible for either a moral order or for attaining wisdom (without which a moral order is impossible).”

 

My response: I always agree with Prager, or at least 80% of the time. He is brilliant and very wise; he is a good man and a pious man. Secular people, especially highly educated people, often deny that God exists, and would insist that consciences are not some divine voices embedded in the psyche or soul of each person to guide their moral choices. They are arrogant and foolish to reject God and God inner voice shared with us by De.

 

I agree with theists and traditionalists more than with atheists and secularists, but we neo-traditionalists require the secular viewpoint, and their continued social presence and active, powerful opposition to us to keep us moderate, honest, loving and growing. I do not want Prager to lose that perspective for secularism and separation-of-church-and-state cultural divisions keeps theists from turning corrupt, tyrannical, and self-righteous.

 

Prager enjoys music, cigars, friends, and the community at his California synagogue, so I believe he is, actually, very grounded in the world. His criticisms of atheists and secularist is usually spot on, but we neo-traditionalists, theists and conservatives must not seek to wipe out the secular point of view. Our point of view needs to dominate a healthy society, but the secondary but significant and powerful dissenting voice from the worldly is healthy and beneficial useful and necessary, and is the way that God wants things to be. Complicated is good and desirable  (moderate); theocracy is one-dimensional, extreme, authoritarian and corrupted.

 

Prager is wise in urging that morality comes from God, for without God’s Ten Commandments and natural laws to guide us, there can be no human wisdom and no moral order. Still, some Satanism, some sin, some worldiness, and some corruption, some secularism keeps religious people honest and balanced.

 

Spiritual goodness is the fountain from which moral goodness flows but the cup of secularism is the worldly vessel that contains the wholesome water that we need to drink to live and be refreshed.

 

Prager continues: “That the great majority of secular people believe the conscience is all that people need to act morally is one more example of the low intellectual level secularism has produced. Other examples include ‘men give birth,’ ‘sex is nonbinary,’ ‘Western civilization is no better than any other civilization,’ ‘color-blind is racist,’ and ‘people are basically good’ (the truly foolish doctrine that people must affirm if they rely on conscience to produce moral behavior).

 

But no secular idiocy is greater than the belief that the conscience can replace God, the Bible, and Judeo-Christian values as a producer of moral behavior.”

 

My response: Most secularists are not the moral, rational, sensible, temperate, liberal, tolerant, civilized kind of traditional secularists in America who enjoyed sinning a little, enjoyed their worldly pleasures and luxuries, and enjoyed their rather innocent participation in worldly concerns and diversions.

 

Prager hammers against Leftists everyday—and he should—these are whom I believe that he is identifying as being bad, godless, unwise secularists. I have long written that Leftistm in America is a Marxist mass movement on the march, and that kind of secularism is scary, evil, passionate, extreme, authoritarian, intolerant, violent, power-hungry and unscientific (spouting woke nonsense like men can menstruate and have babies and that sex in nonbinary) and mendacious (Color-blindness is non-racism, where each individual is judged by his individual character contents not b his collective/ racial traits; Western values are so fine that they need to be taught everywhere, and with Mavellonialist values, should be adopted by people everywhere to mix with their native culture and way of life.) Note that these bad, radicalized, true-believing secularists believe now in junk, disreputable science, things like global warming and 58 genders and masks prevented the spread of Covid 19. Their ideology has corrupted and twisted Western science and medicine.

 

Moderate balance of opposing view teaches us wisdom and humility that in our fanatical pride and procrustean hastiness that we overreach and throw out the baby with the bath water. I am trying to make sure Pragerism restores belief in God, the Bible, the Ten Commandments and the JudeoChristian values without becoming grim, pure, and exclusionary of any worldly wise, loving required inputs, the kind that the traditional gentle secularist enjoyed while remaining staunch, devoted Christian and Jews.

 

It is often hard to know what is the truth, and difficult to discover how we are to act and what do, so if we are godly and moral, listening to God, then we can a bit remain godly and moral by still enjoying temperately secular enjoyments and distractions. That is how it seems to me that it must be.

 

The good is moderate, egoistic, individualistic individual-living, and sacred-secular, not sacred-sacred (Pragerism) nor secular-secular (American revolutionary Marxisim).

 

Prager continues: “The reality is that most people’s consciences are to say the least, easily manipulated. It is hard to imagine any aspect of human life more malleable than the conscience. It is a malleable as putty. And as sturdy. In fact, the malleability of the conscience alone makes the case for God-and-Bible based morality.”

 

My response: Dennis is brilliant in illuminating that people’s consciences are easily manipulated and malleable, easy to lull, put to sleep, as they slip deeper and deeper into sin, hate, cruelty, injustice and godless waywardness, often while convincing themselves that they are morally and intellectually superior to traditionalist and conservatives.

 

My take is that the world is owned by the Dark Couple: they are the guru leaders of their pack, their cult of nonindivudating, joiner, group-living followers. When a whole way of life is a lie, based on a set of lies and falsehoods, people cannot see the moral forest for the trees, so what is bad is called good and what is good is called bad. To some degree it is their fault, but to a larger degree living in conformist packs keeps them asleep and their consciences dull, consciences suppressed, shrunken, shriveled, neutered and silence, conscience as society’s superego meant to nag at us for our misbehavior, conscience as mentioned by Prager as God’s training and voice reminding us of what to do and how to live, and chiding us in a timely fashion when we are stiff-necked, wayward and rebellious.

 

I would take Prager’s Bible-based and God-based morality (or from the faiths of any other benevolent deity) and add Mavellonialism to it. A living-angel, a self-actualized and self-actualizing individuator will be so truth-living, rational, intuitive emtionally honest and in touch with what is and where to go, that their consciences would be highly developed and not at all easy to deceive or manipulate or sway. These maverizers’ conscience would feel guilty and self-attribute low-esteem as deserved when they sinned and lapsed, but feel good about themselves most of the time and overall when they did good tried to be good and follow God while living a sacred and secular life in the here and now, always with God and heaven in mind. The conscience would be useful but not too critical for hyper guilt and hyper criticality can lead to self-loathing and selflessness, and this hatred and rage leads to demonic choices and falling into the wicked lifestyle. Conscience is a most useful and needed corrective tool, but the self must not be too hard on the self, unless the self has so misbehaved so as to deserve censor—like robbing a bank.

 

Prager continues: “If the conscience were morally effective what evildoer or supporter of evil would sleep well at night? Yet, people who commit evil, whether for personal reasons, (such as murderers, thieves and rapists) or for ideological reasons (such as Nazis, communists and Islamist terrorists) sleep as soundly as anyone else. Raskolnikov, the murderer-protagonist in Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment,’ is an exception—but only because he is a fictional character.

 

Virtually, every individual who has committed or supported evil has had a clear conscience. That’s why ‘I answer to my conscience’ is both intellectually and morally meaningless. Every monster and every moral fool ‘answers’ to his conscience. And his conscience tells him he is just fine—especially today, in the age of self-esteem.

 

My response: Again, whether the conscience is superego (secular option) or inner-voice-from-God, it matters not, because evil rules this world (Lucifer) and people are born depraved and run in packs, and society tells them to run in packs and group-live (Altruist ethics, selflessness and collective living and solutions are all demonic enterprises.).With these realities in place, that people are able to do evil as individuals, or a collectivized true-believers serving their ism, it is no wonder they sleep well. Their consciences, as individuals (conscience is an individual not a collective undertaking.), are buried so deep in their subconsciousness beneath the lies and denials, that the wicked sleep well. They may esteem themselves, but this weird form of esteem is the esteem of the moral slave, running in packs, serving dark powers, Evil Spirits, the Dark Couple, If they esteem themselves—and they do—it is the cocky, daredevil insouciance of a serial killer with the blood of his victim dripping off of the knife that he just used to cut her throat.

 

Prager continues: “It is far truer to say that one’s feelings and behavior produce the conscience than the conscience produces one’s feelings and behavior. Overwhelmingly people do either what they want to do and then tell their conscience that what they did was right, or their feelings decide what is right and their simply label those feelings ‘conscience.’”

 

My response: I agree: it is seductive, easy and instrumental for the wicked to do whatever they feel like or are tempted to do, and then label it just and in line with a clear conscience. It is even easier to live the moral lie when the other members of your group praise the evil that you do as praiseworthy.

 

Prager continues: “Here’s another way of proving that the conscience is largely useless in directing right behavior: People on opposite sides of every moral issue are equally convinced they are listening to their conscience. You cannot name an issue wherein this is not the case . . . Given the moral unreliability of the conscience, the word essentially means what one feels is right or wrong. In other words, in most people conscience is a euphemism for feelings, another word for the ‘heart.’

 

So then, given the general uselessness of the ‘conscience,’ how is one to be morally guided”

 

History argues for a combination of God (the God of the Bible) and reason. God without reason often results in fanaticism, and the evil to which that usually leads. And reason without God ends with moral chaos as embodied in the university. Indeed, iron of ironies, reason without God ends with the death of reason. Unless, of course, you believer ‘men give birth’ is rational.”

 

My response: Conscience is not useless in directing right behavior, if people would quit lying to themselves and just tell the truth and speak clearly, and try to act in such a way as to please God and keep civil society operating and functioning. When opponents on every side of any moral issue are equally convinced they are following their consciences, they are the opposite of straight-shooting moderates that seek honorable compromise with the opposition where possible, and agree to not use civil war and punishment to smash the opposition that likely has at least minority levels of truth in their point of view.

 

When our position on any moral issue is radicalized and we become true believers at that point our consciences are what we feel to be right or wrong and that usually is cruel, intolerant, and violent towards competitors and dissenters.

 

I like that Prager suggest that we be morally guided by God and reason, and these moral sources of wisdom strengthen and check each other so that moderation in ethics is maintained, and it another sign of Prager’s wisdom, goodness and greatness that he juxtaposes God and reason as our pillars of conscientious appraisal to decide how to act.