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Conscience and morality have always been a huge problem/brake for all political groups and people – they prevented the former from living and creating more freely, the latter understood little about these concepts and came up with their own opinions on this matter.
Proverbs and sayings on this topic perfectly illustrate and prove all these grief-problems.
“Only a person who has no conscience at all can boast of a clear conscience” are the words of an unknown author, frozen in my mind for many years.
This phrase means that its author and those who are absolutely not against such a deliverance are ignorant first of all. But ignorance would be the easiest syndrome. Much more dangerous is the conscious suppression and striving to destroy a person's conscience.
By the way, this phrase could well be the slogan of the current government in Russia.
Man's spiritual faculties are dormant, because his Ego is so enslaved by matter that It can hardly pay full attention to man's actions even when he is sinning.
The effect that the Ego has on the physical person is what we call ” conscience.”
Conscience can be stifled, but there is no way to destroy it.
Conscience is formed in a person by the religion in which he finds himself, according to his inner acceptance of it.
The conscience of a person (who has at least some religion) .. it is formed by the truths of faith from (the Holy Scriptures of his religion)…, or by teaching (from there)…, according to their acceptance in the heart; for when a person knows the truths of faith, and understands them in his own way, and then wants and fulfills them, then a conscience is created. Acceptance in the heart is acceptance in the will; for the will of man is what is called the heart. Hence it follows that those who have a conscience speak all that they say from the heart, and all that they do is done from the heart. They also have an undivided mind, because they act according to what they understand and recognize as true and good.
In true conscience lies the very spiritual life of man, for in it his faith is bound up with love of God; therefore, for such people, to act according to conscience means to act out of their spiritual life; and to act against conscience means to act against their spiritual life. Hence it is that when they act according to their conscience, they are at peace and inwardly blissful; when they act contrary to it, they are troubled and sorrowful. This grief is called remorse.
Man has a conscience of good and a conscience of justice. The conscience of good is the conscience of the inner man, and the conscience of justice is the conscience of the outer man. The conscience of good is the fulfillment of the commandments of faith from an inner inclination, and the conscience of justice is the fulfillment of civil laws from an external inclination. Those who have a conscience of good also have a conscience of justice, while those who have a conscience of justice, while those who have a conscience of justice have only the ability to accept the conscience of good, and when they are taught, they accept it.
But let examples explain what conscience is. If a man has the property of another without the latter's knowledge, and thus can appropriate it without fear of the law or loss of honor and good name, but returns it to the one to whom it belongs, because it is not his, then he has a conscience, for he does good for the sake of good and just for the sake of just. In the same way, if a person can enter a certain position, but finds out that it is also sought by another who can be more useful to the fatherland than he, and gives way to this latter for the sake of the good of the fatherland, he has a good conscience. So it is with everything else.
From this we can conclude what those who have no conscience are like. They are learned from the opposite; for example, if they make the unjust seem just, and the evil seem good, and vice versa, out of selfish motives, they have no conscience; they do not even know what conscience is; and if they are told that there is a conscience, they do not believe it, and some do not even want to know about it. Such are all those who do only for themselves and the world.
Those who do not accept conscience in the world cannot accept it in the Hereafter, and therefore cannot be saved. The reason for this is that there is no basis in them into which heaven flows and through which the Lord acts through heaven, drawing them to himself; for conscience is the basis and receiver of the heavenly influx. (E. Swedenborg, “The New Jerusalem and Its Heavenly Teaching”)
Hence it is clear that in non – religious people, conscience is only a kind of sentimentality based on uncritical borrowing of the “influence of the environment”. However, when they critically consider this borrowing, since they have no solid, sensuously perceived foundation for it, they are surprised to find that there are no material grounds for conscience, and immediately declare it to be the “chimera” that prevents them from “fully enjoying life”, that is, from acting on the principle ” everything that gives me unpunished pleasure is good – it doesn't matter if someone else suffers from it, as long as that other person is not connected with me by any sentimentality, and thus, to a certain extent, is a part of me.”