Dishonesty weakens your passive guidance system: the conscience

Your conscience is a vital guidance system gifted to you by God that protects you from threats beyond your ability to anticipate. While most people at least try to avoid directly violating their conscience, most are also skilled enough to know how to disable it through deceit. While an active conscience limits evil from accomplishing much, dishonesty impedes its function so thoroughly that great damage can be done to the individual directly and, through them, to others around them. When you lie to yourself, you create a window in which you can do what you know is wrong without immediately feeling as bad for doing it as you would if you were honest about it. However, the guilt will return in amplified force at a later date, and lying can do nothing to avert the increased consequences of the choices you make while doing so.

Your conscience is not a static resource. Through the expansion or contraction of your awareness, your conscience will successively improve or diminish: You can strengthen your conscience through exercising it, just like a muscle, and it can atrophy through misuse in the same way. The more you subdue your conscience, the weaker it will be. You can’t keep your conscience gagged and bound, expecting to untie it occasionally in times of perceived need. The more you work against your conscience, the weaker it becomes. When you turn away from your conscience in any way, you weaken both your ability to see what is right and your strength to do what you believe is right,¹ making it that much easier and more likely that you will do worse things later. Every time you lie, you will damage your conscience further, making it easier to lie again or tell a bigger lie.

If you have thoroughly damaged your conscience, realize that it will take time to restrengthen. Don’t expect your ideas of right and wrong to be accurate while you regularly lie, and don’t expect them to suddenly become accurate the moment you stop lying all of the time.