About Consciousness, Crime, Punishment, and the Bible.

I was walking in the woods yesterday and thinking. This is the place and time when I am most inclined to process all my philosophical thoughts. This time I started thinking about conscience again. First of all how I would define what conscience is for me: conscience is what does not let me sleep at night forcing me to discuss with myself again and again things I did or didn’t do, said or didn’t say, what I would or should do or say differently.

Have you read “Crime and Punishment” by Dostoevski? It’s a famous detective story. A young guy killed an old woman and a detective investigates the crime. The difference is that we, the readers, know all the time who was the killer and follow his every thought and feeling. He couldn’t sleep or eat. He followed the investigator, unable to do anything else. Why didn’t he hide? Because his conscience was punishing him. This was the idea Dostoevski wanted to bring up to us. We often do not need the punishment from society, we punish ourselves harder.

I remember once we discussed this with my husband, he told me that he would never kill somebody just because he couldn’t do that, but he did not steal things only because he didn’t want to end up in jail. I thought of that and at the moment I decided that I would neither kill nor steal just because, that was it. How little I knew myself then. I did kill a mouse just a few years later with my own hands. We lived on an Island in a tent and the mouse got into our bread eating the last slice. I was hitting and hitting this little thing with my slipper even when it was already dead. As you can see my conscience is still reminding me about the event.

I realized that this conversation was about conscience later. It is different for different people. Some will not sleep at night because they were rude to someone, others will lose sleep only if another was rude to them. However, we, as society, force each other to behave in a specific way to make our common life bearable and to avoid conflicts caused by differences in opinions of our individual consciences.

If only we could bring up our children so they could recognize when their conscience (not their friends) talks to them and learn to listen to its suffering.

Very recently I have realized that the Bible is the book written to teach us to talk to our conscience. Maybe, the Old Testament less, but the entire New Testament is only about that.

I want to use one very widely spread example: here is the cite from the Bible “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” and a very common explanation from google: “Given the close connection between ethics and eschatology in Jesus's teachings, Tertullian concluded that the command to “judge not” is a reminder to us that judgment and punishment are not ours to mete, but God's.” Is this possible? Is this reasonable? Why would we wait our whole life to be judged? No way. The judgment and the punishment come right away in a form of your own conscience. And for those who don’t feel it, we, as a society, have a well defined system of police, courts, and jails. There is nothing we do in this system that works against the Bible because the Bible, at least the New Testament, talks to you personally, not to the whole society. You, personally, stop judging others for what they do or say, mind your own business. More accurately worded would be: I should not judge others for what they say or do, I should mind my own business, you do whatever is legal and it’s not my business.