Conscience and Evil
Since we are born with the tendency to think about all that occurs around us as opportunities to please ourselves, the core beliefs of Christianity may not be easy to accept at first. This is especially true for those who are enjoying their lives and satisfying many of their secular needs. Choosing a Christian life involves suppressing egocentric drives, which is naturally uncomfortable. When the spirit is “reborn,” there develops a new Christian conscience, a kind of internal alarm system, that alerts when a thought or action is conflicting with God's Commandments. The Christian belief is that, at the time that someone accepts God's gift of salvation, there is a Holy Spirit that enters the soul. This Holy Spirit, which is the inside presence of God, effectively aligns his mind's secular view of what is right or wrong with God's Will. “What Would Jesus Do” is the operative question since Jesus is regarded as having lived a sinless life. “Right” is to think or do what obeys God's Commandments, and “wrong” is the reverse. Compare this Christian conscience with the secular conscience.
Are we born with a secular conscience that tells right from wrong, completely separate from spiritual faith? It seems that, no matter where on earth, societal laws and cultural traditions reflect the rights and wrongs that seem to be in all of us secularly. Some social scientists argue that such a secular conscience does not come from our DNA but rather develops out of cooperative experience because mutually doing good for others helps society in general to become stronger. Is it that we do the “right” things and do not do the “wrong” things because it is better for all of us to satisfy our secular needs? Whether the secular conscience is innate or learned from experience, each society has developed societal laws and cultural traditions that force individuals to yield to a greater good. In most societies, laws must be obeyed under penalty of prison and cultural traditions obeyed under penalty of social separation. Does the Christian conscience ever conflict with the secular conscience? Or, put another way, are society's laws and traditions ever in conflict with God's Commandments? Yes, they certainly can be. For example, if a Christian, living in the Confederate South of the U.S. in the early 1800s, were to have freed American slaves that were another man's property, he would have been imprisoned. Yet the second Commandment demands that Christians treat others as they want to be treated, that is, not as slaves. Clearly there will be moral dilemmas brought about by the clash of secular rules and law, secular conscience, and Christian conscience. The Christian conscience will pull at the mind and heart of the believer to allow the two great Commandments to dominate thoughts and actions.
In the Christian faith, evil is the force that causes man to have a thought or perform an action contrary to God's Will. God's Will is that believers obey the two great Commandments. Not to obey is to sin, and evil is the force that causes sin. Adam and Eve came to know evil by eating the fruit of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. All men are their descendents, and are subject to the force of evil. Evil has evident characteristics in the Christian faith. First, evil does not exist without man. Evil can only be recognized as the opposite of good when man has a spiritual conscience. Other animals and organisms on earth do not have a known sense of conscience, their actions being responsive only to their instincts to survive. Secondly, evil exists only because man has free will to choose between good and evil. Without free will, man could not choose evil over good. The Christian believer develops a spiritual conscience that influences choices of thoughts and actions in favor of good rather than evil. Thirdly, the force of evil is greater when man's capacity for being tempted to sin is greater. The more that a man has the ability to gratify egocentric needs, the greater the temptation to do so, and the greater the potential strength of evil. For example, most people would judge that the German Nazis succumbed to the temptation to devastate the lives of so many innocent victims because they had vast military resources to do it. If the Nazis had not had access to such resources, they could not have committed so much evil. People with lots of material, emotional, intellectual, and time wealth have more capacity to be tempted to sin than those with little wealth. It is logical that Jesus would teach that the wealthy will have more trouble entering God's Kingdom than the poor.
In the Christian faith, evil is the temptation to sin. Internal conflict occurs when the choice of a thought or an action that gratifies a need is at the expense of obeying God's Will. Internal conflict occurs when the choice of a thought or an action that gratifies a need is at the expense of obeying God's Commandments. For the Christian, evil can only be repelled by the power of the Christian conscience, which provides the alert to avoid the temptation. If the Christian ignores the alert and proceeds with the sinful thought or action, God is hurt; if he makes the choice that obeys the Commandments, God is worshipped. These decisions for good versus evil are made inside the Christian's heart, only visible to God. The potency of evil on the Christian is only as much as the Christian allows it to be.
