Humanity that is truly good: From a Catholic perspective, what is truly good and 'freedom for' is the freedom to choose to direct one's actions towards the fostering of one's relationship with God, and towards the flourishing of the community as a whole. 'Freedom for' does not preclude one's own flourishing. Rather, it affirms that as beings made in the image of God, and hence as social and relational beings, human beings flourish with others. Our flourishing is intimately tied up with the flourishing of others. When we use our freedom in this way, we respect not only the dignity of all human beings, but come closer to realizing the kind of just, peaceful, and joyful community that God wants for humanity. What is truly good, in Catholic terms, is that which God wills. How do we know what God wills? We come to know through revelation, and through the use of our human reason to understand the order of the universe the way God has made it, so that we can cooperate with God in making judgements and choices on that basis. Using these two sources of revelation and reason, we can affirm the good of every human being, their dignity and ways of living whole-heartedly in a community of love, peace and justice with others. When it comes to moral reasoning, we need to consider what is truly good through critical thought, feelings, and reflection. This provides a framework for helping us think through what is the right thing to do in any given moral situation. By doing so, our consciences are well-informed about the starting point of our moral reflection. Encounters with God, in the Church, in the depths of our being, and in those positive human experiences, can heal moral blindness, prejudice, distorted desires, and self-centred passions, and direct our longings for personal worth in ways that seek what is truly good and life-giving in God. Since conscience is your own relationship to the objective truth, believers are obliged to follow their conscience. In other words, what one determines to be good and right based on the use of one's reason is like a law that must be obeyed (Gaudium et spes, 16). So, to not obey your conscience (i.e. to choose not to do what you know to be the morally right thing to do), or to blindly obey others (i.e. to abdicate personal responsibility for moral decisions) is a sin. If conscience is where we relate most closely at a personal level with the objective truth of God and perfect goodness, then to do other than what we believe to be right and true in our conscience is to do other than what we believe to be God's will, to do other than what we believe to be perfect goodness.