Thoughts on conscience, v

Tom's observation regarding free will got me thinking a bit further:

If obedience to an all-loving, omniscient, omnipotent God is what is best for us, why on earth would we be given free will?? Perhaps it is because we learn so much about God's will through others, yet others are often wrong in one way or another, so we need an informed will and conscience to provide guidance. Still, the best reason I can think of for free will is that love is impossible without it, because love is a choice. With that capacity unavoidably comes the possibility of choosing wrongly, of choosing not-love. But I imagine God has a better and more complete reason!

I think the general point I'm trying to get to about conscience is this: instead of allowing it to call us to our best, we too often reduce it to helping us feel okay about whatever it is we've done or think we want to do. Not always, of course. Other times we see an ill, and the only answer we can see to it is what appears to be a lesser ill. But I'm primarily focusing on the former and, in my experience, predominant case. And putting this back into my Catholic (or other Christian, for that matter) perspective, when this becomes our approach to conscience, we'll almost always be in conflict with the Church, because the Church's purpose is to call us to be our best, in relationship with Christ. But if we mentally reduce the Church to an archaic, out-of-touch, man-made institution (none of which I believe it to be), then it is easier for us to reject her guidance without due consideration or attempts to understand the broader issues behind it.

But that doesn't free us to cast self-righteous judgment on those who disagree with us, which too often is just our way of salving our conscience concerning our own shortcomings through favorable comparison. I think it is easier to find the right balance if we've truly both accepted our own shortcomings (I have to be careful not to embrace this term over the more "outdated" sounding concept of "sinfulness") and embraced God's grace. Still, we have to be careful. Yes, Jesus forgave the adulterer, but without telling her that her adultery is okay! And Jesus didn't assume scripture was out of touch with his times, even though much of it had been written centuries before. When he seemed to contradict scripture, it was usually to set a higher standard, such as for the indissolubility of marriage, the adulterous nature of lustful thoughts, or to emphasize mercy over legalism. (Notice: there's a huge difference between mercy and self-righteousness. There's a vast gulf between accepting forgiveness and insisting we don't need it because what we've done isn't wrong!)

So in what do we place our faith? God has given us free will and the ability to reason; are we to value these gifts above the One who gave them? Is it that tough to know God's will, or is it only hard for us to submit to it?

Because in this day and age, it seems as if we've decided that, now that we're so advanced, now that we've so finely honed our ability to reason, we need no longer pay attention to God's opinion, as revealed to us through the scripture and the church throughout salvation history.

BTW, I'm not writing these things from some lofty perch. These are my struggles, too.