The Searing and Death of the American Conscience

By Bud Hancock

Conscience: What It Is

To assume that every educated person knows much, if anything, about “conscience” is possibly a serious error. In fact, I doubt that 50 % of those asked to define what conscience is, could rightly do so. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, conscience is:

• An awareness of morality in regard to one’s behavior; a sense of right and wrong that urges one to act morally
• A source of moral or ethical judgment or pronouncement
• Conforming to one’s own sense of right conduct

For those who actually can offer a correct definition of conscience, it would be surprising if a majority of them consider conscience to be anything more than simply a “personal moral compass” or guide that influences their own personal decisions, e.g., they may say, “My conscience is bothering me”.

But, in a land of more than 300 million people, it stands to reason that large groups, comprising millions of individuals, will share the same moral guidelines, or lack thereof, for their lives; so rather than there being 300 million individual moral compasses, differing in values, there are large groups with the same values who gravitate to each other and whose collective actions can impact the nation.

A good and religious people who hold to Biblical moral values will likely agree to a great extent on their groups’ values. Likewise, the evil people who have for decades used their positions of power and authority to enrich themselves while utterly destroying the lives of many around them, still agree with others whose evil lives and evil actions coincide with theirs, even though their agreement does not make any of them right.

It is altogether natural that those who agree with personal and political, ideologies will seek out and identify with those of like mind. While the ideologies of individuals have very little impact on an entire nation, it is the collective ideologies and beliefs that determine the national identity and consciousness of a nation. When one identity and consciousness rises above all others, a change in the national conscience can occur that has the potential to determine the future course of that nation, either for a short time or possibly many decades, even centuries.

The Early United States Conscience/Identity

During the formative years of the United States of America, American pioneers, ordinary people who longed for their own space and the freedom to see the unlimited beauty and greatness this land offered, began moving ever further westward from the original thirteen colonies, taking their personal religious beliefs, political ideologies and premises with them. The fledgling nation’s identity, her conscientiousness and indeed her conscience were among the most important features of her national makeup. As the pioneers moved, leaving the original states far behind, many of them held tightly onto their tenets and premises, the belief systems they were taught by their parents. Those tenets which formed their personal beliefs and premises helped them as they fought their way westward while settling the vast lands that were for the most part, unexplored.

Many of the original settlers did not survive the harsh environment they faced, but those who did became tougher than nails, determined to produce for their children and grandchildren a more prosperous and free future. Their tenacity, toughness and determination to succeed became the backbone of this nation as it grew and was tamed by them and successive waves of pioneers. They presented to the world the face of a developing nation founded upon their Judeo-Christian principles, the same beliefs that the founders of the original colonies brought with them from Europe.

Those vast lands presented a more or less blank canvas upon which the brave souls would paint the future of the new nation. Their efforts would, to a great extent, determine the future of the nation as more and more settlers followed the original pioneers westward.

However, our vast rural areas were eventually “conquered” and developed into miles of farmlands that produced massive crops, along with massive and often over-populated cities. The undeveloped rural areas, wild and in need of men to reshape and develop them into productive farmland, forced men to rely on their faith in God, the same faith they were taught by their ancestors. They also learned to offer, and often accept, the assistance of their neighbors, sometimes at the cost of their own lives. They proved what true neighbors are supposed to be, and do. Their accomplishments paved the way for those who, in the future, would build upon that which they started. Through all their hard work and a combination of successes and failures, they built, not only a thriving and prosperous nation, but the national thinking and behavior which became known as the American national conscience. Their lives offered a realistic look at what many called the American Dream: property ownership, true freedom and a legacy of helping their neighbors at all times and in all conditions.

Alexis de Tocqueville, French philosopher and historian who traveled the United States, nearly from coast to coast, at least in the settled areas, from 1832-1834 said:

“Upon my arrival in the United States the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more I perceived the great political consequences resulting from this new state of things. In France, I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.

The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.”

ALEXIS De TOQUEVILLE

M. de Tocqueville had personally witnessed the conscience of this new nation and was amazed by it when he compared it to what he had personally experienced in France. The pioneers had built that conscience/conscientiousness so firmly into the settlements they created that it remained years later, embedded in the daily lives of their descendants. It permeated every area of life, the personal, the political, the social, and the religious. No part of American life was unaffected by it.

The America seen by M. de Tocqueville now seems to exist only in the misty world of our history and words such as were penned by him. As can be seen in today’s United States, many of those who settled for living in the crowded conditions of what are now some of the largest metropolitan cities in America, learned to live, not on their own industriousness, and their mutual reliance on their neighbors, but off the backs of the less fortunate, surviving often by evil means rather than relying on God and His help and wisdom. Their lives, their actions, culminated in what is now known as the political process in America.

“America is Great Because America is Good”

Even though M. de Tocqueville is credited with speaking these words, there is no historical proof of that. He may indeed have uttered the words since a lot of his writing indicates that is what he felt. But regardless of who originally authored them, they have been used through the years as a testament to the greatness and goodness of America. Ironically, it is politicians who usually quote them while it is also politicians who have been most responsible for them losing their meaning now.

Proverbs 14:34 says: “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people”. When the level of sin in any nation reaches a point beyond which that nation can be considered “good”, it can no longer be considered “great”.

No longer is the United States considered “good”, hence it cannot be considered “great”; the seared conscience of this nation has given her the reputation of being baby-killers, destroying multiple millions of unborn babies in their mothers wombs, and now becoming the nation that promotes selling aborted baby parts.

The United States is also considered to be the money-grubbing bully who interferes in other countries’ business, often trying to force our foreign policies on nations who no longer fear or respect us.

As many decades, and now several centuries, have passed since the founding of the United States, M. de Tocqueville would likely have different statements to make regarding the “greatness and goodness” of America if he were alive and visiting here now.

The United States involvement is so many useless wars wherein the nation had little to no skin in the game, the wild expansion of the “American Empire”, with thousands of U.S. soldiers, sailors and airmen assigned to so many U.S. military bases on every continent, our nation rushing in to either save one leader, or take a leader down and/or establish another whenever a skirmish occurs, has changed not only the culture in our nation, it has seriously damaged our reputation around the globe.

The love and hope that our nation once offered around the world to those seeking the reassurance that those traits truly exist in the United States, those like Alexis de Tocqueville, who had personally witnessed the goodness and greatness of America, soon was replaced by an intense political desire for obtaining more and more power and control over the populations of other nations; thus, the American Empire was being born.

As that empire grew with massive and ever increasing influence over the politics and policies of many sovereign nations, the original conscience, identity and conscientiousness that once defined the United States of America as a moral and righteous nation, a “great because it is good” nation, based on our historical Judeo-Christian values, soon devolved into a a total lack of conscience. More accurately, the national conscience that should have continued proving to the world that our nation is still great and good, became a “seared conscience” (1 Timothy 4:2). Our once great nation is now known nearly world-wide for its absolutely corrupt political system, a system based on deceit, lies and greed, offering little to nothing of value to any American citizen, let alone foreign nations.

What our nation now offers to the world is:

• Instruction in how to cheat at, and win, elections
• How to produce an abortion industry that offers aborted baby parts to the highest bidders
• How to overturn the governments of nations led by duly elected leaders, or undesirable dictators (in the eyes of the U.S.)
• How to launder untold billions of dollars in dirty money using both friends and enemies in various governments

Our government has also become quite adept at promising great things to our allies while stabbing them in the back at the same time.

Conclusion: The Importance of Conscience to All Humanity

Given that so many people neither accept, nor even believe in, God, it will be difficult for all unbelievers to understand why the conscience is so important. Let’s go back and review the dictionary definition of the word, conscience:

• An awareness of morality in regard to one’s behavior; a sense of right and wrong that urges one to act morally
• A source of moral or ethical judgment or pronouncement
• Conforming to one’s own sense of right conduct

All definitions indicate that the conscience is a link to something that causes or offers a belief system on proper human behavior, and the link is directly to the God Who created the universe, the Earth and all the creatures on this planet. He deliberately implanted the conscience into the human psyche so that an inquiring person could diligently seek for the answers to the most important questions we all face: “Since we all live on the same ball of earth, how do we conduct ourselves so that we can live in peace, harmony and experience the life that our Creator desires us to live”?

When we truly desire to know the answer to this question, we must have a place where the answer resides, and that place is in the Word of God; the human conscience allows us to seek for those answers, but the seeking is a decision that every free moral agent on this planet must make for himself. When enough people do this, a major change can occur in the way that all humans see each other and relate to each other. The result can be a turn to the “good” and away from the “evil”. The state of living in the “good zone” will bring about the harmony that should have been man’s normal state, and would have been had sin not entered in. But when the opposite is true, and multitudes of people ignore the access God provided through the human conscience, the evil nature of people who have no knowledge of God and His Word gains the advantage and sin becomes the normal state, leaving chaos and destruction in its wake.

This is where we now find the United States and indeed, the whole world, existing in a nearly total state of chaos and destruction because God, His wisdom and His mercy are shunned as being irrelevant. God’s Word written by the Apostle Paul says this about the human conscience: ACTS 23

“Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron;” (1 Timothy 4:1-2). The indication in these verses is that believers who have “departed from the faith” are the ones with the seared conscience, but it stands to reason that those who have never been believers are also subject to the same searing of their consciences (Read Romans 1:17-32) and will suffer the same results as those former believers who turn from their faith in God.

Anyone who has even a slight awareness of the mess happening around the globe, but especially here in the United States, must understand that the problems we are all living through are the result of heeding the seducing spirits and doctrines of devils that have nearly taken over the American Conscience and produced a collective seared conscience, one totally incapable of making the needed contact with God in order to receive the truth and live by it, making it possible to accept the murder of many millions of unborn human beings, rejoicing publicly in the evil deeds of all the neighbors of Israel who want to destroy every Jew and wipe out the State of Israel. There are so many other acts of pure evil happening that it would take many more words to describe them, but these two are, in my opinion, the ones which are now bringing about the destruction, planned from ages ago by Satan, of not only the United States, but of every Christian nation on Earth.

Satan’s evil plan is being aided by so many phony politicians who care neither for God nor humanity, but live only for their own enrichment and pleasure. They are selling out their own countrymen and nation while rejoicing in their own evil conduct and ill-gotten monetary rewards.

But I have some words of advice for them all: “You are living on borrowed time, so go ahead, you with the seared consciences, enjoy, if you can, the fruits of your evil deeds because the time is soon coming when you will face a wrathful Lion of the Tribe of Judah Who will demand an accounting of ALL your evil deeds. When you stand there looking into those eyes of flaming fire, what will your response be? If you believe you can buy your way out of the judgement coming to you with your ill-gotten riches, you are more delusional than you could ever know. Standing there facing Jesus Christ, you will know then that your money is worthless. May God have mercy on your eternal souls.

Born and raised in a small textile town in North Carolina, Bud’s family moved to Michigan in the hope of finding better employment with General Motors.  After graduating from high school, Bud began an apprenticeship with General Motors to become a Metal Modelmaker.  Retiring after a 30 year career, which included an eight year stint as a Metrologist (Science of high precision measurement), he and his wife moved back to North Carolina to be near his elderly parents.  Shortly thereafter, with both of his parents having passed, he began a new career in the bank security/ATM business, advancing from an entry level technician to one of two North Carolina customer service managers for his employer.  Retiring again after 13 years, he and his wife of 51 years relocated to Tennessee where Bud began writing articles emphasizing Biblical teaching and geopolitical issues.  At age 75, he and his wife relocated to South Carolina with their Miniature Schnauzer, Baxter.  Bud continues to study God’s word and write articles on Christian living and geopolitical issues from the Biblical end times  perspective.