Conscience and Religion

"For there can and must be no radical difference between morality and religion. If a conflict arises between them, if the testimony of the Bible contradicts the testimony of the moral conscience, this dispute should be settled in a way that respects the absolute primacy of the moral consciousness. For if we relinquish this primacy, we forego any criterion of religious truth; then we no longer have any standard by which to measure the claims to certainty of an alleged revelation or distinguish, within religion itself, between reality and deception. Every literal interpretation of the Bible must therefore be rejected which commands us to act contrary to the first principles of morality." (Ernst Cassirer paraphrasing Bayle's (17th century philosopher) philosophy on religion)

"Past times are is if they had never been. It is always necessary to start at the point at which one already stands, and at which nations have arrived." (Voltaire)

This is probably one of the most interesting questions I know of: When there is a conflict between what a convention that we recognize as authority prescribes, and what something inside us says. Bayle is saying that since all religious belief originates in conscience and feeling--a realm beyond physical senses and the basis for revelation--than if we were to relegate conscience to a secondary position when deciding the truth of something, we would negate religion's foundation. This has always been interesting for me even though I can't say that I have had great struggles between my conscience and what my traditional beliefs have prescribed; it has been more a matter of gaining knowledge and confirming that something was true. I am aware though that this can be an extremely real problem. I think that Voltaire's quote clears this up a bit though. One would do well to take everything presented to them as authority as new and to test it out against their conscience. We would have to remembe Kant's cautioning that we proceed this way without rejecting and disobeying it also. If we were to question everything and disobey everything until we received some type of inner feeling of it being in harmony with our morals, society would be a mess.