Ideal Conscience

 

We have a sense of morality through our conscience, and we have a sense of God because we are made in His image. Our sense of morality depends on our individual experiences, and our individual experiences condition how consistent we are and how well equipped we are at making ethical decisions and doing the right thing. A man brought up by drug-dealing criminal parents would probably have different moral successes than a man brought up by two Christian charity workers. A homeless lady has to make different daily decisions to a lady who is the chief executive of a large finance company.

This is important, because every individual is aware of a kind of ideal self they aspire to be, but the conception of the ideal self varies within individuals according to our experience - especially our experience of family, our role-models in our life, our experience of diversity, our education of moral thinkers, our social development, and so forth. Just as tall and short people can reach different heights on the apple tree, and just as fit and unfit people can run different speeds in a race, so too can different levels of moral experience affect how high our moral ideals can be conceived at an individual level. In other words, people have varying conceptions of an ideal, and varying levels of effort to reach those ideals, which means they judge their own conduct differently, let themselves off with different levels of ease, and act or fail to act based on a number of other factors and considerations.

We assess our own thoughts and deeds through our conscience, and we examine ourselves through that conscience. Our conscience is a bit like a sergeant who we try to stay on the right side of, and try to satisfy ethically, but different people have stricter and not-so-strict sergeants, depending on the accumulation of their experience, where, to make matters even more complex, the strictness also varies according to which particular thought or action is being assessed. So our conscience is perhaps more like an entire police force, where a different officer deals with your financial dishonesty compared to the one who deals with your speeding or the one who deals with your bad temper, and so forth.

The point is, we build our considerations of both morality and God from different perspectives with different experiences. Even with our personal sense of an ideal, we are going to judge ourselves a lot less truthfully and a lot less honestly than God will (and probably with a lot more leniency than we deserve). Our conscience is only as competent as we are, just as our beliefs are only as good as our reasoning and evidential scrutiny has permitted, and both are therefore not fit to serve as the commander in chief at the police station of our conscience. Furthermore, our conceptions of God and of the Bible are only as good as our own weight of experience and intellectual considerations, so the likelihood that there is a lack of fitness in this area too is incredibly high.