Luckily secularists had a role in framing our Constitution, though perhaps that document doesn't meet George's litmus test for "conscientious truth-seeking".
Religion, he reasons, should be thought of as "conscientious truth-seeking regarding the ultimate sources of meaning and value" and, therefore, "a crucial dimension of human well-being and fulfillment".
If the Constitution is to be effectively enforced against the political branches when the chips are down and the stakes are high, we must have judges who are committed to judicial engagement: conscientious, impartial truth-seeking in every constitutional case, without unwarranted deference to the political branches.
Purdy is wrong about the Fifth Amendment, wrong about judicial review, and wrong about the supposedly dire consequences of the approach advocated by Somin and other libertarians who argue that judicial engagement--fact-sensitive, conscientious judicial truth-seeking into the constitutionality of the government's means and ends--is required whenever plausible abuses of government power are alleged.
Smith, who had attended the Society of Connoisseurs in Murder, remembered McDade "as a devoted lover of books, an assiduous researcher, a conscientious guardian of the truth, an accomplished writer, and a man most generous to all who sought his help".
If academic education has this moral purpose -- namely, the acquisition of traits that lead us to be conscientious in the pursuit of truth -- then much of the rationale for separate instruction in civic virtue falls away.
By the same token, nobody had made Mr Fortov sign the letter about Mr Khodorkovsky's trial or hang Mr Putin's portrait on his wall.Russia still produces brave individuals, independent and conscientious enough to speak the truth to the state.
Human attempts to discern truth are fallible and fumbling, but conscientious efforts to strain for it are often rewarded with glimpses.
Only when his father was dying three decades after Schiffman was granted conscientious-objector status did he learn the "overdue" truth that the status was granted in return for his father keeping a draft board colonel's alleged domestic abuse secret.
Meat/dairy/egg consumption is the real Inconvenient Truth for all of us who are conscientious eco activists.
Such at least is the conventional narrative which, if it overlooks many beautiful and conscientious works now being rediscovered, still contains a portion of truth.
