I was also using the word "sense", Mishka, which is closer to "faculty", but whatever it is, it is unreliable, as you pointed yourself in this article.

Morals are morals, they come from God regardless whether or not you are aware of them or believe in them.
Ethics are stable enough, once agreed upon.
But conscience - now you feel it, now you don't; or if it is a faculty, now it works, now it doesn't. It also depends on many factors, such as education: with bad education one may feel bad conscience about things that are not morally wrong at all, while sleeping well with crimes that one was told are OK. An example is if you don't feel a pang or twitch when eating a slaughtered animal.

Acting on conscience is mediocre.

Just as "My tooth hurts, so I see the dentist", so is "My conscience hurts so I make amends and help others": such a response is not out of the love of God, but out of necessity, and so its merits are limited.

Goodness is not determined by the results, but by the purity of the intentions behind one's actions - results are anyway not ours but up to God.

Only in the most abstract sense, Yuyutsu.

>>You, the conscious, are unchanging.<<

Only in that I am fundamentally the same "consciousness" that I have had all my life. I haven't stolen or borrowed anyone else's.

But that is the only sense in which "unchanging" can apply. You are using it in the sense of "self", which demonstrably remains unchanged throughout my life. I was born and will die, the same individual person.

As you so rightly point out, my awareness expanded as I got older. But to suggest that my consciousness remained unaltered by this additional information is to completely redefine the word.

I am using the term "consciousness" - somewhat more loosely, and far less philosphically - in the sense that Kant employs:

"...consciousness according to Kant... had to be the experience of a conscious self situated in an objective world structured with respect to space, time and causality."

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/

The "objective world structured with respect to space, time and causality" necessarily undergoes change. It cannot possibly remain unchanged.

Which, to bring us back to my original point, is why I disagree with your assertion that:

>>Consciousness has never emerged: in association with a human body and brain it merely has more toys to play with.<<

And as you would be aware, I could never accept your word on this:

>>Morals are morals, they come from God regardless whether or not you are aware of them or believe in them.<<

As so often happens when religion intrudes on a discussion, we get a statement such as this which relies upon an entirely circular argument. It takes as its base premise that God exists; once you do that, God becomes the answer to everything. To refute the proposition, you need to take God out of the equation, and I know that would be impossible for you to do.

But it does shed light on why you are so hung up about an unchanging consciousness.

No, Yuyutsu. Conscience is not a feeling that comes and goes. The only reason is is unreliable is if it falls out of use or is not heeded. It's a means of determining right and wrong. What you're describing is more akin to guilt, which is a feeling that might arise from the workings of one's conscience, which we sometimes describe as being "on one's conscience" or a "guilty conscience". The feeling or sense of guilt may come and go, but conscience is always there, we just have to remember to use it, and the more we exercise it the more reliable it is. Guilt shows that our conscience is still operative - whether we ignore it or fail to consult it regularly is another matter. Conscience is not a guilty feeling, and it is not "mediocre". Acting according to one's conscience means evaluating what is the right and good course of action in any given situation. Guilt only arises when one disobeys one's conscience and does not act as one should.

Morals can be individual and determined by one's conscience or society-wide and a means of informing one's conscience. I may be religious, but I don't think religion has a monopoly on morality. Atheists can form morals and live according to moral norms, and that morality can be innate - whether that natural sense of right and wrong ultimately comes from God as our Creator isn't particularly relevant.

*It's a means of determining right and wrong*

So tell me something, Mishka. Let's say a child has been indoctrinated
by religious parents, about the evils of masturbation.
The child of course believes this, yet his/her hormones
trigger as they do and the child lands up doing what comes
naturally.

Is this really a means of determining right from wrong?

Is masturbation really evil?

Dear Pericles,

Since you asked and as you guessed, God is not an answer, but the answer to everything is God. I would try not to mention "God" when writing to you, because I understand that the word carries for you all sorts of socio-historic connotations that would only drive you away (though I don't carry such connotations myself), but in this case I was writing to Mishka, not to you.

Kant's definition of "the experience of a conscious self situated in an objective world structured with respect to space, time and causality" sounds to me like a pretty accurate description of ego. If that's what you mean by "consciousness", then I agree - ego has emerged and does evolve. You, of course, are not your ego!

Dear Mishka,

What you are describing is more akin to listening to the voice of God within. I fully agree that atheists can do that too, because intellectual conceptualization of God is not necessary (though it can be quite useful on one's spiritual path, especially for removing fear).

Listening to God's voice is cultivated by refraining from listening to other things. Guilt is produced by not following whatever one has been listening to - ideally that would be the voice of God within, but it could also be the voice of men, the voice of society or even the voice of those little devils, or genes. Your personal experience seems to be that guilt comes from disobeying your conscience (eg. the voice of God within), so then you are lucky, but others get to feel guilty for less noble causes (a common example in contemporary western society is to feel guilty out of failure in sexual conquests).

Yabby, call me old-fashioned, but my ladylike sensibilities make me recoil from a frank discussion of masturbation in a public forum. However, seeing as you've been so crude as to bring it up, allow me to deal with it in more general terms. Conscience can overcome indoctrination. I agree it makes it more difficult, but I would not excuse anyone for participating in death camps just because they had been indoctrinated by some political group. We expect conscience to operate in such extreme circumstances and so too it can operate in lesser matters. Your example has two incorrect assumptions: 1) that the child is incapable of using his/her conscience to decide for him/herself whether he/she has been instructed correctly; and 2) that conscience is identical to morals. Conscience and morals are separate, as I noted in my previous post replying to Yuyutsu. I suggest you re-read it. I think we should question everything, but that doesn't mean never finding an answer. Conscience ideally should be well-informed - we can't exercise judgement in a vacuum - and that should include the instruction we receive from parents, schools, etc.. Obviously, the younger the child the more susceptible to indoctrination and the less freedom they have to make decisions, but they should nevertheless be encouraged to begin using their conscience to evaluate situations.

As for your final question, why don't you ask a priest? Seeing as you have so many misconceptions about the Catholic Church, you might be surprised at the answer. Most of the priests I've spoken to say that they hear more confessions from non-Catholics than from Catholics, and I think you will find that masturbation is considered 'venial' and 'not a big deal' in the larger scheme of things. A child who really believes they have done something wrong needs understanding and forgiveness, not to be told that they're wrong. Telling someone who has a genuine moral conviction that their belief is wrong and that they should go about doing wrong things is highly disrespectful to their conscience.