By Umm Abdullah
February
12, 2021
When a
nation is facing a rapidly deteriorating situation, it only takes a single
voice of confident resistance to revolutionize an entire culture. This is not
an exaggeration. Human history is full of examples of heroic individuals who
displayed courage where others would have exercised caution. Their secret, was
moral conviction.
Civil
Rights pioneer Rosa Parks encapsulated the spirit of moral conviction when she
said, “I have learned over the years that when one mind is made up this
diminishes fear; Knowing what must be done does away with fear.”
Authoritarian
regimes understand the unstoppable power of moral conviction, which is why they
arbitrarily enforce irrational social regulations and controls. It is their
attempt to ensure that our minds can only understand morality in the context of
blind obedience.
By removing
volition and rationality from the field of morality they are able to reduce a
nation’s entire moral code down to one question: To obey or not to obey?
The
difference between an authoritarian nation and a free one is that free nations
are built on principles not personalities. And the two fundamental principles
that protect us from tyranny are individual rights and objective law. If and
when either of these are compromised, we should, as a matter of moral
conviction, resist.
Moral
conviction is an attribute of the individual and is a function of choice.
Without choice you neutralize the sense of empowerment one can experience in
doing what’s right. Therefore the concept of morality cannot exist without
choice.
The
recognition that individual rights are a prerequisite to morality and that the
freely chosen is more metaphysically powerful in creating a just society than
any kind of social engineering or government interference, was the basis on
which democratic political theories were formulated.
Preserving
our political principles and ideals is the cause of our times. As the late
civil right hero Martin Luther King once said.
“You may be
38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands
before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great
issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid….You
refuse to do it because you want to live longer….You’re afraid that you will
lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will
lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab you, or shoot at
you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand. Well, you may go on
and live until you are 90, but you’re just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90.
And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of
an earlier death of the spirit.”
Original
Headline: The Unstoppable Power of Moral Conviction
Source: The Patheos
URL: https://newageislam.com/spiritual-meditations/moral-conviction-attribute/d/124325 |
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