Season 4 Podcast 18 “Weaponizing Conscience” Pt I
There are various dictionary definitions of conscience
· “Consciousness of the moral right and wrong of one’s own acts or motives.”
· “A sense of right and wrong with an urge to do right.”
· An inner feeling or voice viewed as acting as a guide to the rightness or wrongness of one’s behavior.”
· “The sense or consciousness of the moral goodness or blameworthiness of one’s own conduct, intentions, or character together with a feeling of obligation to do right to be good.”
One must ask, what is missing from all those definitions? Or perhaps a better question is, what are the assumptions in each of those definitions. Take the key words that appear in all the definitions above::
· Moral right and wrong
· Rightness or wrongness of one’s behavior
· Inner sense of what is right or wrong
· Feeling that you know and should do what is right and avoid doing what is wrong
The assumption is that everyone agrees on what is right and what is wrong. Once upon a time that was true in America because our moral sense was founded on the Bible, particularly the Ten Commandments. What has happened, however, now that the Bible has been removed and political correctness has taken its place? It renders the definitions of conscience above as meaningless.
Who defines right? And who defines wrong? You? Government? The liberal left? California? The Democratic Party? The woke generation? Black Lives Matter? The Democratic Party? God? Catholics? Protestants? The Bible? The law?
What about views regarding abortion? Gay marriage? Gender? Critical Race Theory? Global warming? Wearing fur? Eating meat? Fossil fuels? Homosexuality? Adultery?
Our Declaration of Independence speaks of self-evident truths such as
· all men are created equal,
· all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
· that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.-
Those lines would not have been written today. For example, they assume
· That God exists
· That God is our creator
· That God created all men equal
· That God endowed us with certain unalienable Rights
It is inevitable that the Declaration of Independence in the near future will be condemned as politically incorrect, that the language is sexist or racist or exclusive or male dominated or offensive. Just as there are those who insist that we remove God from our coins, from our pledge of allegiance, from the halls of congress, there will be those who will insist that we remove allusions to God from our founding documents. The declaration above as well as the following offensive lines will be removed or rewritten from our Declaration of Independence because they refer to God or because they use male dominated language:
1. “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
2. “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
