As for your conscience, that's something to give you mind-food as you cope with surviving.
"I always say that we feel free, those of us who have followed our own conscience – that is the greatest freedom.
Frank McGuinness, the Irish playwright, said: "During the darkest days of the Northern Ireland conflict he was our conscience: a conscience that was accurate and precise in how it articulated what was happening.
Then we can honestly be comfortable in our consciences that this kid will get through, that we've done our job.
Charles Lineweaver has argued that our "ideas of "good" and "evil", and our consciences that we rely on to help us make moral decisions (like Pinnochio's Jiminy Cricket), are features of consciousness that have evolved under selection pressure, just like skin color, intestinal pH and fingernail growth rates".
The government of the United States is forcing us to violate our conscience and that is unacceptable.
The bigger question is, what is the source itself -- is it civil rights, is it the laws we need to follow, can religion tell us right from wrong in today's world, is it personal conscience that determines our way, is it social conscience, public conscience?
We need to scrap our tendency to assume that international law is inherently virtuous, and that anything that shocks our conscience -- that helicopter video or widespread torture in Iraq under the noses of U.S. soldiers -- must be a violation of this system, rather than its logical and predictable consequence.
