Moral Intelligence

You can get a degree in all kinds of things, but it seems no institute of higher learning recognizes any need to develop moral intelligence.
When you examine any particular issue in light of moral truth, it changes all the answers you get. It was the one thing that kept me from accepting several offers to work through a masters program at a couple of different schools. I was offered three different shots at a masters in History, one in Economics and one in Secondary Education. This is not boasting, because anyone willing to do just a modicum of work got the same offers. That stuff is in easy reach, but it was always reaching in the wrong direction. I also could have easily gotten several different brands of Theology and Divinity degrees, but even those don’t quite cut it. That is, they were all cerebral about things which simply aren’t on the path God called me to follow.
You can call it what you like, but I’ve never met anyone who didn’t have an imperative burned into their soul. Most never paid any attention to it, including an awful lot of seminary students and graduates. They might have been sure they felt something, but never knew what it was, simply bought the standing assumptions everyone else put in front of them. If your moral choices aren’t your very own, and if they don’t cost you much in terms of psychic suffering over the inevitable confusion of the human condition, then you have chosen not to choose.
You cannot let someone else choose it for you. Least of all would I suggest you need to take my path. I talk about mine so folks can get a clue about their own search. I want you to see the results in whatever terms you can understand, but please recognize it’s worth the agony of setting aside all those pre-packaged versions of reality to find yourself.
Here’s a clue I hope helps you: Morality is not rules. Morality is a living thing. It’s a chunk of your own soul responding to what you experience according to imperatives bigger than yourself. You recognize that you are participating in something that came long before you, and you’re doing your best to chase down the trail behind it. This thing is invariably contrary to what everyone else is selling because virtually no one in our current world wants you to be free to follow that thing which calls your soul. They want to control the outcomes of your search.
Let me be one of that less-than-1% who say otherwise. You don’t have to pass through the same trauma I did, but you do have to escape the prison at whatever cost that is to you. If you are one of those rare few people who grew up in a context where this was “normal” then count your blessings, because I’ve not met a single person like that. I’ve only heard of them. Moral intelligence is recognizing your reality for yourself, and pursuing it against your contrary inclinations. No one is without some internal conflicts; morality is the search for a referee.
The conflict is eternal; there is no degree because you are never finished puzzling it out.