Long before Marvin Gaye sang about letting one's conscience be one's guide but shortly after Jiminy Cricket first proffered that advice to his little wooden pal Pinocchio, my mother would repeat it to me. When I would ask her if it would be all right to act in a certain way, say a certain thing or avoid something else, she would often say, "Son, let your conscience be your guide."

 

I spent a lot of brain fag as a young boy trying to figure out where and what this thing called a "conscience" was. I remember looking up the word in a tattered dictionary in my fifth-grade room at about age 10. I found that it was derived from a Latin term -- conscientia -- "with or having knowledge."

 

I took it from there and decided that what I knew then and come eventually to know would be my guide in making decisions about what to do, not to do, what to say and not to say -- even what to think and not to think. I was not raised Catholic by my Catholic father, so "impure thoughts" were not subjects of discussion.

 

As it turned out during and after puberty, I had plenty of them. Father Jude up at the church surely would have broken into a sweat had I mumbled the content of those Technicolor daydreams through the screen, thence into his priestly ears. I presume I would have received not only absolution but, as well, a considerable penance to do. I was spared that in the local Methodist Sunday school.

 

So one's "conscience," according to Merriam-Webster, is what a person knows.

 

The issue, though, is what "knowing" something means. If, at some point in your toddler years, you placed your hand on a hot stove burner, you knew that you should never do so again -- unless you enjoyed pain. Knowledge that counts for anything is what one learns from reasoned experience. One does not "know" something because he or she is told it.

 

I am sorry to say that as a kid I was told that Jews were "not like us" and that I should avoid anything more than passing contact with them. How would Dad have reacted if he had known that for a very brief time in my adolescent years I was head over heels in love with the unapproachable (and, sadly, late) Ruth Laredo -- n�e Meckler? Or that I am a life member of the Society for Secular Humanist Judaism and that one of my best friends for years was the founder of humanistic Judaism, the late Rabbi Sherwin Wine? Wine, by the way, was the kind of leader who, when he passed by, the rest of us stepped aside. His brilliance occasionally could make a colleague feel like a limp piece of cheese one finds on a plate the morning after the party.

 

How did I get so far away from that parental warning that having Jews in my life would be a problem for me? I got away from that and other prejudices common in the 1940s and 1950s among the WASP American middle class by coming to "know" what was real and what was truth.

 

I was and still am in the process of building an informed conscience. I am a philosopher -- and that of a particular branch of this ancient and honorable discipline concerned with language and the precise meaning of words and which seeks the truth of a matter by relying on empirical data rather than opinions based on a priori assertions.

 

Example: Setting aside "taught things" and replacing them with "experienced things," where, for example, another human being is concerned will dictate how one will relate to that person. Dad, even though he was wont to say that "tolerance" should be the goal, told me essentially that Jews were alien and, as such, somewhat suspicious as to motive. That was Dad's opinion, as it turned out, based solely on bias handed down from older relatives.

 

As an adult, I became able to put away such essentially childish things, as the Jew, St. Paul, put it. Simply in the course of living I came to accumulate knowledge about individual Jewish persons and came to see them in the same way I had seen the Anglo Saxon Protestants with whom I grew up, viz., as individual human beings. Because they were Jews and I had become their friends, I learned a great deal about a culture rich in tradition and informative of my own Christianity. It turned out that I was more like them, rather than seeing them as "not like us."

 

I was guided in all that by my "conscience," that is my acquired knowledge logically analyzed and digested. So today, for example, if I were a county clerk in receipt of an application for marriage from a lesbian or gay couple for a license, there would be no problem.

 

That would not make me a better person than the Kentucky clerk who turned away such a couple. For her refusal, she was found in contempt of a federal court and now has intimate knowledge of life in a jail cell. Evidently her refusal to issue the license proceeded from religious belief, i.e. by what she was told in Sunday school or from the pulpit. It was not her conscience at work in the decision. She is neither a bad person nor should she be ridiculed for her refusal. She simply doesn't know enough.