"To be, or not to be, that is the question."
Poor Hamlet, on the one hand this, and the other hand that. Oh, what to do, what to do (wringing hands, worried look on face).
His conscience must've been bothering him.
Some little voice within was trying to tell him what to do, while another was telling him not to do it.
The First Amendment, a class on which we are preparing, has as a large component the subject of conscience. Numerous references to the protection of individual conscience appear, especially on the question of the relation of church and state. Should the state have the power, or right, to tell you what you must believe in order to save your soul, assuming, of course, that you have one? Don't look for it in Gray's Anatomy. But there is more to life than Gray's Anatomy, isn't there, just as there's more to life than bread alone, although you wouldn't want to do with either, or a soul, would you.
So I Googled 'conscience' and came up with this helpful Wikipedia definition and discussion of this building block, make that cornerstone, to our world.
Your job is to think of examples of conscience, its motivational power, today and in the past, which have shaped the way we think about the world today.
Did the Jews resist bowing down to the Roman Empire? Why?
What are some examples in Homer's Odyssey and Iliad that illustrate the power of conscience? When the audience is told, in the Iliad, that if Hector is killed in his fight with Achilles at Troy, his wife and son will become slaves, and she a sex slave to a conquering general, was Homer addressing the conscience of the audience as to rightness or wrongness of slavery, perchance? You're right, he probably wasn't, but we're free to read that into the drama, as an exercise of our own sense of what's right or wrong...our conscience, if you will.
What IS a matter of conscience?
A young man refusing to fight in a war he deems unjust? Conscientious objectors.
A person who refuses to pay taxes used to support an unjust war?
Suppose government taxes you in order to support a church whose beliefs you oppose?
That's how our First Amendment got started, actually. In the Virginia colony, a commercial venture, not religious, the Church of England was nevertheless supported out of tax collections. Baptists and Presbyterians, who hated bishops (the Church of England, or Episcopal Church, was made of bishops), objected to paying taxes to support a church they opposed. Thomas Jefferson drafted a proposed law, which the Virginia legislature passed, prohibiting the practice. Later, after the Revolution, his friend and ally Madison borrowed the principle and incorporated it as the 3rd Amendment to his twelve-unit Bill of Rights. As the first two failed to pass, Number Three has become our First Amendment, raising it to a place of prominence.
What could Madison have been thinking to place it third?
We're going to have to speak to the little man (He was a short skinny guy who made a not so hot president. He brought the country into a war with Britain, in 1812, ran it poorly, fled the nation's capital, Washington, D.C. in a panic, and watched helplessly as the Brits burned the White House. Aside from that he was great.).
But James Madison did have a head for constitutions and we are the beneficiaries.
So thank you very much, Mr. Madison.