Am I not right, then, to be concerned that there may be many today suffering from the very same delusion? Or that I myself may be falling into this very same trap by using this parable to critique the religion of others when I should rather be examining myself? How do I deal with my guilt? That's the issue. Am I content simply to ease the pangs of conscience by persuading myself that 'I'm OK, thank you very much'? Or do I, like that tax man, yearn for some much more radical solution than that to the pollution of my soul?
This issue of handling guilt was brought home to me some years ago with peculiar force. I had to counsel a young university student who had just had an abortion to avoid the inconvenience of a pregnancy that would have interrupted her degree course. To her surprise she found herself overwhelmed with guilt in the aftermath of the operation. So devastated was she by what she had done that she had even attempted suicide, and that's why I'd been asked to see her. What do you say to a young woman like that?
I'll tell you what a lot of her friends were saying. 'Don't be so silly. You're just suffering from a form of post-natal depression. It's your hormones. You've got nothing to be ashamed of. Snap out of it! What's the difference between an abortion and a spontaneous miscarriage?'
Some of her colleagues were studying psychology, and had gladly analysed her guilt feelings in terms of Freud and Jung. She herself was a social scientist and was well aware of the argument that all moral convictions are just the result of human societal conditioning. Maybe if she'd looked hard enough she could have found some culture somewhere that regularly procured abortions without any conscience about it whatsoever. But she still felt guilty. And no amount of rationalizing would take the feeling away.
She had discovered what her friends, employing the modern secular equivalents of pharisaical religion, had
