Conscience and a Respectable Voice

 
Filed on 23 June 2010 in Food For Thought category. Print This Page

Conscience and a Respectable Voice

Hannah Arendt writes of Adolf Eichmann “His conscience was indeed set at rest when he saw the zeal and eagerness with which ‘good society’ everywhere reacted as he did.  He did not need to ‘close his ears to the voice of conscience’ as the judgment has it, not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a ‘respectable voice,’ with the voice of respectable society around him.”

Is that not a frightening analysis?  The voice of conscience submerged by the desire to conform, to be part of respectable society, to be successful.

(Fr Sean Fernandez writing on anti-Semitism. The Record 16 June 2010)

“At this point in Australia we have banned the mixing of human genes with animal eggs but in England they have recently approved this citing the fact that the public are now more at ease with the concept of hybrids or chimeras as long as they are also destroyed at 14 days. Note the justification – the public are now more at ease with this.  This is frightening – we are becoming desensitized to things we would never have contemplated.”

From Confessing Christ in a Culture that has Forgotten how to Shudder (rev. June 2010)

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2 Responses to “Conscience and a Respectable Voice”

  1. Anna Cook 24 June 2010 at 12:22 pm Permalink

    So long as we deny the reality of right and wrong we will remain unable to recognise or withstand evil. Our world needs the Gospel and the real Jesus now as never before. Each of us should prayerfully try to live our Christianity faithfully and consistently in secular society if we hope to stem the current onslaught against Gospel values which threatens to overwhelm and govern all public policy. These are not the days for a siege mentality, not yet anyway!

  2. Phillip Milligan 10 November 2010 at 11:40 am Permalink

    I believe that without restraints of conscience, human beings find themselves doing whatever they can do increasingly without regard to the effect on others and the collateral damage to souls and lives involved. This is a recipe for disaster in the long run.


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