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What is Morality ?

bpfine

Member
WHAT IS MORALITY?

Morality is simply the standard that operates on the human conscience to monitor and control thought and behavior. God place His ten spiritual laws within the human conscience. These laws were clearly defined to the Jews when Moses received them from God on Mount Sinai 3500 years ago. The ten spiritual laws were known to the Jews as the Ten Commandments.

These laws reflect God's divine nature; because these laws were placed within man, he is a moral agent. In this sense, mankind is created in the image of God.

When man deviates from these laws (that is, when he transgresses them), and does not seek repentance and forgiveness, his conscience darkens, he loses sight of his identity, and he becomes even less than the animals. Animals are amoral. Mankind, the moral agent, becomes immoral.

Since every man is a transgressor of his conscience, he is caught in a trap. His failure to act in the way he knows in his conscience is right creates guilt. The conscience of man monitors good and evil, both externally and internally. That is, it was designed by God to screen thoughts that enter our mind through environmental effects, and it also monitors our personal thoughts that arise within.

When the conscience is operating in a healthy capacity, it will reject immoral thoughts that are in conflict with the laws of God, which are written on the inner conscience. Thus, morality functions in direct relationship with human conscience. The human conscience, to be perfectly clear, is like the door to a castle: once it is broken down, the castle can be overcome. Pornography is an attack on the moral conscience.

Morality, based on the God-given law inscribed on the human conscience, was verified to the Jews on stone tablets. These laws clearly express God's standard of righteousness and form the basis of human morality. In the western world, this concept is expressed as the Judeo-Christian ethic.

The human conscience stands to defend the inner person (or the subconscious) from the attack on morality. As human beings grow, they are either reinforced in their conscience, thus defending their inner person, or they are inundated and eroded by the opposite forces, which mitigate against this principle. This was the fate of Ted Bundy, who became the serial killer.

Since the world defines the inner person as the subconscious mind, it is hard to make a point as to what the spiritual implications are in this context. Most people, including Christians, accept the notion that whatever isn't conscious mind is subconscious mind. They accept the world's definition as true. The fact of the matter is, what men call the subconscious mind is actually a man's spirit. The attack upon morality is an attack on the door to a man's spirit. If the door (conscience) is broken in, the man's inner temple (his spirit) is assailed and as in Ted Bundy's case--possessed.

Since we are spirit encased in flesh, the attack on our spirit is an attack on who we are. It is an assault on our personal identity. Ted Bundy is a classic example of the war that rages over a man's temple. Bundy became the antithesis of what God intended for him to be.
 
Morality is simply the standard that operates on the human conscience to monitor and control thought and behavior. God place His ten spiritual laws within the human conscience.
Hmmmm, I'm not so sure about that explanation. Consider - if you are right, we should not be able to question the morality of God. We do however. Who among us is relaxed about the morality of punishing the children of a sinner unto the third or fourth generation or the servants of a sinner? What about slaying a whole town because of some minor sin by one person? I don't think morality is as simple as you suggest.

Look at the commandments. Some of them are obviously moral - such as 'Thou shalt not kill', yet we march off to war with prayers ringing in our ears and kill people by the thousand. What happened to morality there?

'Keep holy the Sabbath' - very few of us do that and I certainly have no moral qualms about working on the Sabbath or even on a Sunday if there is a good reason to do so.

'No graven images' - do you even know what 'graven' means? I have no problem with graven images, I have some lovely ones.

I 'covet' all sorts of things without any feeling of guilt and I bet you do too.

The notion that instinctive morality is put there by God rather than being a learned behavior is interesting. Many generations of many societies had little concern for anyone but their own families or tribes. To this day, warring tribes behave in a manner which most of us would consider completely immoral - so I feel that the notion of God given moral instincts is highly questionable.

Once a civilization has developed to the stage where it has laws, government and schooling we learn from one another what is and is not acceptable within that civilization. We learn the 'morals' of that civilization and grow up assuming that they are instinctive, probably because caring for your own family IS instinctive - we see that all the time in animals. If you spend a bit of time in a more primitive culture or simply a very different culture, you will observe different moral standards. To us they may seem immoral but to that culture, they are moral and possibly very important.
 
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