by Milton Johanides

Created on: January 06, 2010   Last Updated: January 07, 2010

A good conscience is one of the most important indicators of your moral health, and in fact the link between conscience and morality is a two way street. With a good conscience you avoid doing those things that are going to get you into trouble so your moral health improves, which in turn has a positive influence on your conscience. But where does the concept of goodness come from? Most people learn what it is to be good from their parents, from school, or from their church. These are all positive sources of education if they are preaching the right message. The interesting thing is that we do not always grow up with the same moral attitude as our parents. As we enter our teens and begin to make our own decisions many of us question the lessons we learnt as children. At this point our moral health is influenced by our peers, the people we hang around with, and also by experience. If we begin to employ the lessons our parents taught us and end up in a mess as a result, we tend to turn against those ideas. Similarly, if our parents do not appear to be benefiting from their own advice, we begin to question it. So, for example, the instruction "Be good, and God will protect you," can be tested from experience. If we test our moral advisors and find that some of their instructions are false then we question everything that we have been told.

Many years of life experience contribute to our analysis of what is good or bad. Youngsters are free to try different things until they discover what works and what doesn´t. Their idea of morality may change as time goes on. As individuals mature, having gathered a deal of life experience, their decisions become regulated by that life experience. Religion teaches us that there are certain moral absolutes, mainly encapsulated in the Ten Commandments. The wondrous thing about the Ten Commandments is that even though they were written several millennia ago, most people today would agree with nearly all of them. In fact the only ones people disagree on are the four relating to the existence of God. The rest concerning. respect, stealing, adultery and covetousness, are all recognised concepts of morality even in a secular society.

Hopefully, by the time you reach middle age you have a moral conscience that closely ties up with the general view of what it is to be good, particularly as outlined in the Bible. The question of whether you accept a God as the author of that morality is up to you. Some people will accept a God as their moral guide, others will not, but acceptance of some kind of spiritual input into your decision making is likely to have nothing but a good effect on your conscience. If you are religious you will believe that your conscience is influenced through your prayers by a divine will. This is another two way street. Your prayers connect you with the deity which in turn influences you through your conscience. Good behaviour flows from this relationship with the Lord.

A mature view of this question will accept that we spend our whole lives learning what it is to be good, and some might say that it never happens. But on the whole, a good conscience will lead to good moral decision-making, especially if it is rooted in a sound religious model.   

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