Newsfeeds from across the nation are focusing on the eruption of pro-Palestine protests happening at many college campuses throughout the country. From coast to coast, more college campuses are filled with Hamas sympathizers demanding a divesture from Israel and openly participating in antisemitic actions and taunts against Jewish students and faculty.
As Elizabeth Laurel reported in her last post, some of the protesters are ‘professional’ gangsters funded by George Soros. They are members of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR). Their sole purpose is to whip up crowds with hate speech and violence and attract other misguided students to join the cause of the terrorist Hamas, who chant from the “river to the sea,” promoting the genocide of the Israeli people.
Not all protesters on these campuses are paid. Many students from these colleges and universities have no affiliation with the pro-Palestinian student groups, yet they support Hamas and other terrorist organizations in their protests. These students come from upper-middle-class and wealthy backgrounds and have embraced what they believe is the social justice issue of their time. As Laurel demonstrated, these students have been steeped in the curriculum of oppressors, and those seen as oppressed must be defended at all costs. For them, no matter the circumstances, the supposed victim always has the higher moral ground.
It is possible those students who have long separated themselves from God are protesting in the vacuum of their moral bankruptcy and have lost the ability to distinguish between right and wrong. When these college students advocate for a terrorist organization like Hamas, which has as its unapologetic objective of eliminating Jews and ignoring the genocide it promotes, then something has gone very wrong in their moral development. Simply put, they have lost their moral compass.
The main reason someone fails to know right and wrong is that their conscience is disabled and ceases to do what it intends. When the objective moral order is unheeded, subjective feelings usually guide the person. Feelings are not rational; they are emotional. Many abhorrent things can be justified if feelings are used solely to determine good from evil. This is why so many people are okay with letting babies be killed and children mutilated. Ethnic cleansing only becomes the opposite side of the same coin. Such can happen when individuals displace their conscience with an emotional response.
For those not driven by feelings alone, the conscience is the means to determine good from evil. A properly functional conscience does two things to help live morally. Before any act is committed, the conscience informs the person whether the proposed act is in accordance with the good, and if it is, there is no conflict. However, people can override their conscience and often do so by sinning. Continued disregard of one’s conscience by persistent sinning will disable it, ultimately resulting in the inability to know the difference between right and wrong.
Conscience also serves as a moral guide after the proposed act is executed. A properly formed conscience will either convict a person of an evil or acquit him if his action is not sinful. A person with a functioning conscience has a moral guide to follow. When the conscience no longer does what it is intended to do, moral bankruptcy soon follows.
From a theological perspective, it is understandable why there is so much craziness today. Those who have disabled their consciences due to atheism or ongoing sinning have lost their moral compass and their ability to differentiate between right and wrong.
Although the campus protests are disturbing to witness, more disheartening is how many young students on college campuses have lost their way and embraced the darkness instead of the light of God.