Thoughts on Conscience and Will

Conscience necessitates that we have wills and that they be respected.

There is also a respect of others implicit. If each of us has the right to do according to our own consciences, we cannot impose things on others against their consciences (or wills).

Obviously, as the old saying goes, you cannot make a horse drink by taking it to water. You can't make a child eat food, if they truly will not chew and swallow. We have to persuade and convince and open a being to what we wish them to do in those cases. (The only way you'd control these kinds of acts in other people is by manipulation and mental control; overriding their free will as opposed to persuading their consciences.)

It is hard for our society to accept this in many cases. It has almost seemed to be a 'natural law' of governments and countries that as time goes on, they will take more and more control over the citizens of the country. The very, very general reason for this is that the world is fallen and things will go wrong, and they will, at the time, seem like something we must Do Something About, and so laws are created, and those who would have abided by Common Decency are now constrained to abide by it regardless of what they believe.

It is rarely easy to say 'that should never have happened' in a particular case. But as it all adds up, I become increasingly convinced that it somehow should not have happened, and then I think about how it would be possible for it not to have happened. It all comes down to what we believe about reality and about human nature; the Governing Laws of Ultimate Reality.

There has been a massive shift. It seems to have started in the Enlightenment, when it became popular to believe that people are not bad, but that systems make them bad (if I am not wrong). So therefore, THINGS make people good or bad, and we can control the THINGS to make people act in the right way and to prevent all bad outcomes. It gets as down-to-earth as putting up barriers so people simply cannot go in some direction, not merely trusting them to direct themselves well and to be interested in following the 'beaten path' we want them to follow. (And, boy, are those barriers often extremely ugly!)

The truth is, with the amount of time generations are trained on being externally directed instead of self-directed, people lose the ability to learn how to self-direct. I really do believe that nowadays, we have a lot of people who could not for the life of them really discern and direct their paths (in both spiritual and concrete ways) because they have so long been directed.

Going back to a previous paragraph, it is hard to say that this should not be the case. I personally do not like the loss of free will very much. But it is harsh to say 'such and such accidents had to be allowed to happen because we cannot encroach upon people's free will.' The only way it can be viewed as un-harsh to say is if we rewind culture to a time when people accepted a lot of basic Christian tenets. And many people now would view that as incredibly backward, harsh, even evil. I believe many Christians instinctively know this so deep down that they are not conscious of the effect this has on what they think and do.