My age is an especially tough time because I am trying to find my own spiritual identity, yet I also still must rely on the spiritual nurturing my parents provided me.
The reason I find this interesting is mainly because of some real-life conversations I've had with friends regarding this self-same issue.
In general, though, it's less about spiritual identity and more about moral identity. For example, "I have this nagging feeling that such-and-such is wrong, but the only reason I think I feel that way is because Mom and Dad said so."
There is, I think, a modern stigma to this line of reasoning. I suppose we all go through periods of time where our parents really don't know anything, but it's hard for me to understand precisely why so many of us think that simply because Mom and Dad said something is wrong that it is actually right. There seems to be some kind of an illogical conclusion that if we haven't a justification for a line of thinking, that line of thinking is invalid.
Perhaps at the root of it is the willingness to accept some kind of moral relativism. Relativism implies that we determine morality for ourselves, so moral authority comes from within rather than without.
There's a lot of people who try to write conscience off as a sort of collective consciousness of right and wrong that's imposed culturally. The reason that sociologists still use the term mores, however, is precisely because morals are perceived to exist separately from culture—they are not a cultural unit. I suppose some sociologists no longer make this distinction, and perhaps practically speaking, neither does anyone else.
But at least one of the questions we have to answer for ourselves at some point is whence comes our principles of right and wrong. Cultural mores are one thing, of course, but what about the "greater" sins? The kind of clothes women wear today would be culturally unacceptable in bygone eras, but few communities have ever condoned murder.1
In a very real way, this is connected tightly to some of the thoughts I've explored regarding authority in general in previous writings. In fact, it's connected to nearly every hotbutton issue today regarding family, religion, evolutionary philosophy, God's role as Creator, and so on.
Ultimately, I think we find that when we set ourselves up as a moral authority, we immediately deny its reality. Ironically enough, the same set of people who deny the reality of morals simultaneously expect God to act as though they are objective. This, to me, is the tacit admission that the Golden Rule, at least, impossible to deny as an objective moral, and therefore the Old Testament version: "Love your neighbor as yourself."
[1] I suppose that in the six "horizontal" commandments, the only one that has ever been specifically condoned in some cultures is adultery. The Scythians were noted for having their women in common, for example, and there's a reason prostitution is the world's oldest profession. My cultural education is fairly limited, but I don't know of any in which lying was considered acceptable in principle, or where it was appropriate to dishonor one's parents, murder someone, et c.
