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Forming Your Conscience is Harder than it Looks

Forming Your Conscience is Harder than it Looks

Last updated on: February 23, 2018 at 12:54 pm by credo

Forming Your Conscience is Harder than it Looks 2018-02-23T12:54:42-05:00 credo

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Election Day in Philadelphia 1815 by John Lewis Krimmel

We want fast solutions, but not everything worth having can be achieved without pain and personal sacrifice. As I look to this election I experience that same emotional tension begging me to let it explode that I felt when trying to control my motions to form that pot. I sit here, attempting to form my conscience, and it is every bit as frustrating, every bit as difficult.

I’m tired of the single-issue of abortion dictating how one votes. I’m especially tired of both major political parties taking advantage of this fact and using false promises and tired rhetoric to control the voting population in predictable ways.

Below you’ll find a link to a conversation I had with fellow Patheos blogger, Sam Rocha, on Outside the Walls about what steps we can take to form our consciences as we prepare ourselves to vote. It’s a riveting conversation. We addressed both how to form our consciences overall, and with respect to the current election cycle.

However you end up voting, I’d ask you to seriously consider why you are doing so, and whether it will actually accomplish what you hope it will. Focusing on the single issue will ultimately spoil the pot. It will twist and collapse on you and become useless in the long-run.

All I know is that if we continue to vote against the person we like least, instead of voting for things we actually believe in, we are only contributing to the problem. We have become political enablers, allowing the major political parties to continue in their dysfunction. I hope one day that the best of both parties will coalesce into a new party, while the worst of both parties disappears. But until that happens, you and I have the responsibility to form our whole conscience, not just look to talking heads to form our conclusions for us.

Outside the Walls episode with Sam Rocha

Extra Reading

To form my conscience this year, I’m going to be reading the following:
Forming Consciences For Faithful Citizenship – USCCB
Conscience and Truth – Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
Rerum Novarum – Pope Leo XIII
Centesimus Annus – Pope St. John Paul II
and Laudato Si – Pope Francis

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