Lesson 1:  Notes for Confirmands.

1.1. Confirmation marks the end of childhood. Up to now parents have been fully responsible for your welfare. You are now at an age when you start to take responsibility for your own actions. Your parents and the Temple Society want to help you in the process of taking full responsibility for what you do in your life. Confirmation classes and the Confirmation ceremony are an important part of this guidance.

1.2. The Latin word “confirmare” means “to strengthen” or “to make firm”. We understand confirmation as a strengthening of your inner self. Our particular concern is that you will be completely honest with yourself. We want to help you develop a strong conscience so that you will recognise what is true and what is best for you, given what you know to be true.

 1.3. A confirmand is a person being confirmed. The age of confirmation is chosen for several reasons. It is the time when your own social standing becomes important, when your ideas compete with parental rules, and when your growth brings visible changes from child to adult. People expect you now to take responsibility for your actions. Your freedoms become greater. Confirmands now need to depend more strongly on their own inner strength to master all these new challenges.

 1.4. From school, TAFE college and university, as well as from communication media (papers, radio, TV, internet) and your peers, you learn about the things of the world. But where do you learn about values and goals for life?

The part of you concerned with searching for values, meaning and goals is called your inner, or spiritual part. People used to call it your soul.

 1.5. For a successful and satisfying life, you need to balance external, worldly challenges, temptations and needs, with the inner spiritual life by which you set your goals and values. Your family and the Temple Society try to help you set values and goals that will give you the best possible life. Confirmation concerns your spiritual, inner life. We try to balance your worldly needs, wants and pleasures, by an inner strength so that you will achieve a complete and satisfying life.

 1.6. The “organ”, you could also call it the “tool”, by which you recognise truth and what you should do about it, is the conscience. In confirmation classes we help you to become aware of your conscience. We also try to strengthen your conscience.

 1.7. A guilty conscience, when we do something we know we shouldn’t, is probably the way in which we use the word conscience most often. Even dogs show the external signs of “having a guilty conscience”, when we catch them doing something that normally gets punished. The body language, when the dogs or we get caught, reveals a conflict between what we secretly want, yet know we shouldn’t have.

For humans, conscience can be trained to a higher level. A trained conscience tells us clearly what is right and what is wrong, what we know is true and what is false, and also the actions that will achieve harmony between what we do and our values and goals in life. If we act in the way our conscience tells us is right, we will keep our conscience clear. In this way conscience ensures harmony between our values and our actions. It is a fact that persons with clear consciences lead happier, healthier and more satisfying lives than persons whose consciences are bothering them.

1.8. The first definition of religion in the Macquarie Dictionary is “the quest for the values of the ideal life”. The sentence goes on to say there are three parts to this quest: the ideal itself (that is the values), how you live to achieve the values, and the theology, or world view (that is the explanation of how you achieve the values and why this is important). Clearly, conscience is important in religion. Religion is deeply concerned with the values and goals of life, that is, with our spiritual, inner life. If you want to be happy in your religion and in your life, you should bring your (inner) values into harmony with how you live (outside, in the world), preferably always, not only on Sundays and holy days. Here your conscience helps you. The Temple Society is a religious society, deeply concerned with life’s values. Details of the Templer religion come up in later classes.

1.9. Let me just say here that the Templer religion is something very straightforward, though not always easy to achieve. Templers have a vision. Humans can be better than they usually are. They can love rather than hate, be honest rather than lie, be concerned for the whole community rather than primarily for Number 1, our own selfish self, and so on. If people actually live according to these better values in their daily life, then the world and society will be much happier and more satisfying than with any other way of living. Jesus, a Jewish teacher, born in Palestine about 2000 years ago, pointed out that humans can be like this. People should not wait for anyone else, or for a supernatural being such as God, to make the world perfect. They should start the job themselves, each individual adopting these values and then living according to them. In the words of his time Jesus called the vision “the kingdom of God” and told people to strive for this kingdom above everything else. Our Templer religion is to try to live in this way.

 1.10. What Jesus did and said is recorded, with varying accuracy, in the parts of the bible called the Gospels of the New Testament. Different parts of the bible were written from about 2800 years ago to about 1800 years ago. Therefore the ideas and words in which the stories are told are old-fashioned and often say things we now know to be wrong. This does not make the ideas about people and what they do, which the writers were trying to express, wrong. But we must dig for the truth of what they were saying rather than allowing ourselves to be put off by what to us is obvious nonsense. The people then didn’t know any better. Many Templers read the bible critically in this way and find much wisdom there. Most are interested in what Jesus actually did say about the kingdom of God. What should people do if they want to live a better, more satisfying life (and in that way make the world a better place)?