CONSCIENCE - OFTEN DEFORMED BY EMOTIONAL REASONING LEAVING US THAT OUR MORALS ARE ABOUT FEELINGS NOT TRUTH

Catholic teaching is that if your conscience is totally wrong you still have to follow it. The action is still wrong but God will overlook you for you are acting with sincere good intentions. A horrific example is the ISIS suicide bomber, who makes a fast and quick decision to kill on the basis that Allah commands holy war and promises victory to Islam. Indeed, you would expect God to protect the notion that is at war even if it is being provocative and fighting a dirty war if the religion it has is the true one. Back to the bomber. Conscience has to go on regardless. If there is not much time to contemplate, and there never is in matters of life and death, and if you can’t get the full picture of why or why not to act then conscience by itself is not as useful as religion makes out.  Nobody has the full picture.

From this we see that Islamic State is saying nothing remarkable when it claims it bombers can go straight to Heaven. So called moderate religion like Catholicism says it too! If a man does not want his terrorists to go to Hell he can brainwash them so that they can still go even after taking hundreds with them to a fiery death.

The horrific things about these doctrines is how they as good as condone the terrorism.

Your conscience is the part of you that judges you as good or bad. If you do bad, it will make you feel you should be punished though you will not likely want to be punished. It will make you feel you should be disapproved of. Many say the solution to the problem of how your conscience punishes you is to go and seek forgiveness and to make a genuine new start.

Some thinkers regard the conscience as totalitarian. They think that because the conscience can go where no dictator can go.
 
Religious people regard the conscience as something put into them by God so it is the voice of God in a manner of speaking. This makes the conscience a bigger moral bully than it normally would be.
 
You need your conscience but do you really need to to add to its power? If you see it as a mechanism that God is running to control you and bully you if you disobey that will lead to several problems:
 
Guilt will be worse.
 
You risk seeing moral values that are false and programmed into you by society or prejudice or emotion as firm and certain for God is as good as confirming them.
 
Forgiveness is not going to be a great experience if fear and pressure are behind it.
 
You develop the arrogant attitude that you know what right and wrong is clearly - in reality you know it roughly.
 
You lose sight of the fact that the person who turns their life around freely as opposed to being bullied into it by conscience is better off and the better person.
 
It is easy to see how the fusion of God's moral values and your limited fallible conscience can turn you into a victim who is governed by fear more than joy and who wants to inflict this condition on others.
 
Though the Church does try to think out a moral philosophy, the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of Christians judge by their feelings not their consciences nearly all the time.
This shows that religion is actually irrelevant when it comes to encouraging people to behave well. God cannot reward “morals” that are lived because of feeling and not because they are morals. To do so would be to repudiate the importance of morality.
 
Christianity makes such serious claims that every believer would need to be an expert in philosophy and theology to justify believing in those claims.
 
This commandment Jesus gave that we must love God with 100% of our heart, mind and strength does not tell us to put God first. Rather it tells us that all the loving we do must be for his sake. Jesus said this was the greatest commandment. Then he gave us what he indicated was the second most important - to love our neighbour. We love our neighbour to please God and not the neighbour. This love does not really value the neighbour except as a means to please God. If we feel affection for another, we must make sure that it is only allowed for God’s benefit. So strictly speaking, you are to love God alone.
 
Christianity says that those who die estranged from God will go to Hell to suffer forever. To feel that somebody has done something seriously bad and deserves an eternity in Hell is actually vindictive. You are showing you would condemn that person to that fate because of how you feel about what he or she did.
 
The Church says that love of God and love of neighbour go together. This really implies that loving God means obeying him. Instead of love being spontaneous it has to be commanded. That is not love. "Love God by loving your neighbour for it is his will", does not mean you care about God. You care about his will. Christians are commanded by Christ to love God because he good not because he pleasant or good for you, not necessarily good for you even if he is good.　Few if any could obey that!
 
If you love God with all your heart or more than anything, it would be hard to see if you really love your neighbour.
 
If you love God passionately you can’t see if you love others properly. Love blinds.
 
Love God with all your mind does not mean God approves of your reasoning. It really means you let God tell you how to reason and think. It forbids you to think for yourself.
 
The Catholic doctrine that our love for God is measured by how hard we try to keep his commandments is ridiculous. What would we think of a person who said that a wife’s love for her husband is measured by her obedience to her husband? We obey the law but does that mean we really love it or trust it?
 
Laws that consider people not God are against God. No system of law can be perfectly just. Not even God’s. Nor is it meant to be. God’s law is necessarily only perfect under the circumstances. Every law hurts some innocent. It is bizarre how some think that God's law should suit them. LGBT people think that. They ridicule the law as it discriminates against them in defiance of the fact that no law is meant to be perfect. It is meant to be best even if we don't understand how it is for the best.
 
Love should not be an obligation. You cannot obligate anybody to love. Those who say that those who reject love will go to Hell forever for there is no love there are blackmailing those who fail to love. To present people with a God who is love or whose law is love is to oppress them. It accuses people who don’t make a bigger effort to love of being partly partial to Hell.
 
If you put God first, that only means you love him and love others but you love him the most. You do not give him all your heart.
 
Nothing you do is perfect. Even when you give money to a beggar you are hurting another beggar because you are not giving to him. But you do what you have reason to think is for the best.
 
Every person has a different idea of what is immoral and immoral. We do not really all agree that murder is wrong. If somebody murdered Jack the Ripper many of us would be happy. And those who do believe murder is wrong disagree on whether or not abortion is murder. Our morality is imperfect. It is dangerous. We have to have it though. We need values. But to suggest that our imperfect moral codes are revealed by a perfect God and sanctioned by him is pure evil. Instead, we should live out our moral code but we should not be blind to its imperfection and potential harmfulness.
 
A good person is not the same as a moral person.
 
To be good you have to make yourself and everybody maximally happy and make everybody’s wellbeing 100%.
 
To be moral, you have to do the thing that is the least evil but you will not consider punitive justice an evil.
 
So the good person avoids evil as much as possible while the moral person avoids "unjust" evil.
 
Being good means doing no harm but only good. Being moral means doing harm even as you do your best not to. Moral implies law and laws have to be obeyed. You have to suffer if you disobey. So the moral person will harm the immoral person by admonishing her or punishing her or if unable to by wishing punishment was possible.
 
The moral person will make many mistakes. God and society give the person rewards for doing the right things. But this is dishonest of them. Nobody really knows if they are doing the right thing or not. They can only intend to do it. Thus they should be rewarded for their intentions. But sadly we never see their intentions!
 
Moral people are typically hated and feared while good people are adored. We do not really care about what is right so much as we do what we feel.
 
All religions have to put up with a certain amount of moral disagreement in their ranks. For some, it is commonsense that you let a woman have an abortion if she is in danger of dying as a result of being pregnant. Others decree that she may have an abortion if her health is under serious threat and not her life. Others forbid abortion even if it saves the mother. Not all these different views can be sensible. All except one must be really based on what people feel is moral and not on what they think is moral.
 
I repeat - the disagreement indicates that many of us do not decide our morals on rational grounds but on emotional grounds. We condemn things because we want them to be bad. We don’t care if they are really bad or not. The fact that we give sound rational, reasons for our moral stances does nothing at all to prove that we take these stances because reason tells us to. Just because we give reasons why x is right or wrong morally, it doesn’t prove that we believe because of those reasons and not simply because we feel we want to believe.

People never believe what they want to believe just because they want to. There is more to it than that. Just because you want to believe in something you believe in doesn’t mean you believe in it simply because you want to.
 
People usually dislike something first and then look for reasons to condemn it. If you dislike seeing a dog kicked, you condemn because you dislike it not because it is wrong.

Though God is supposed to be important to believers he actually is not. People really care more about what they want to think about good and evil than they do God! They are humanists at heart!