Religious Referent Transmission in The Process of Conscience Development: A Qualitative Study

The concept of conscience is attributed to many different meanings, but its origins remain a subject of debate among several scholars. In the first century BCE, early Stoics defined the conscience as an internal voice that made ethical judgments. While classical Greek philosophy and the Old Testament did not use the term itself, they did understand and employ the idea of such a faculty using the corresponding concept of the heart. Conscience is not found as an explicit term within the Qur’an, but there are a number of verses that speak of the concept. Numerous studies show correlations with different variables from parental attitude to religious tendency. In this study, the focus is on the process of conscience development in Qur’an course students (N=9) and how religious text is used. This is a qualitative study which employed the interview method and a phenomenological approach. The results demonstrated religion as a tool to help guide the individual in distinguishing what is right and what is wrong. However, the participants obeyed religious rules based on their personal life goals, individual expectations. Because of this, they used the same religious text for different stages of conscience