ArcaMax

"A person's moral sense of right and wrong, viewed as acting as a guide to one's behavior" -- the dictionary definition of "conscience."

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 need to answer to any god; I answer to my conscience."

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).

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 the 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.

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 as malleable as putty. And as sturdy. In fact, the malleability of the conscience alone makes the case for God- and Bible-based morality.

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.

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