Today my granddaughter asked me a question worth discussing; What is the conscience?
What does one have a conscience?!
I answered her directly by saying:
It is a feeling of a person’s assessment of himself according to a set of moral values that have been deposited in his conscience through experience and life about what is right and what is wrong, and in this case it is relative to each of the human beings. Others have him if he is extremely sensitive to others’ evaluation of him, regardless of his personal values.
And conscience may exaggerate cruelty to oneself sometimes by exaggerating the estimation of mistakes.
But I really don’t think I made it easy for her
Between myself and myself, I said it is permissible that the essence of the philosophy of religions historically was with the aim of creating a collective conscience of absolute right and wrong according to divine standards so that it is not relative from one person to another. It means building a moral base for societies. But we have transformed religion into sanctifying its means, not its heart
And I heard a sage say: Conscience is that part of the mind, which is responsible for the moral course of man. It is the one who transmits instructions and warnings to us to evaluate and control the types of thoughts we think and actions we act, so that it causes us pain and guilt when we do things that do not conform to our moral principles. Conscience urges us to prefer the right, the good, and the good, over the wrong, the bad, and the bad. The conscience directs us by giving its judgment on what we have thought and acted upon, and what we intend to think and act upon.
The French thinker, Victor Hugo, said, “Conscience is the voice of God in man.”
And he also says in his book Les Miserable Genius
“Conscience is an arena in which lusts and temptations compete, and a cave of thoughts that arouse in us potentials of shame or ugliness.”
The Greek philosopher Socrates says: “Just as the law prevents man from transgression, so conscience prevents man from doing evil.”
Painting by Dr. Badrawi