[American Thinker] We have all been circling around the genesis of our society's ills since the COVID epidemic struck and the riots and peaceful protests began. It is not ironic that everything happened seemingly at once; rather, once the wound appeared, it became inflamed and infected almost immediately.On the most fundamental level, we are suffering from a complete disrespect for boundaries. The idea of boundaries is fairly simple, yet its roots grow deep, indeed to the core of humanity. One of my favorite books describes the entire book of Genesis from the Bible as an ironic story about boundaries (The Book of J, Harold Bloom & David Rosenberg).
Genesis describes the boundaries of the land of Canaan, but it also explains the boundaries between neighbors, between enemies, between men and women, between tribes, and most importantly between God and man, Heaven and Earth. The boundary between God and man exists even for the atheist because his faith is rooted not in a divine being, but in something else. Whatever it is that he believes in matters not. Science, anti-science, political ideology — something gives him sustenance, and between him and that ideal, there lies a boundary. It may only be his own misery he has faith in. That is enough to create a boundary.
A crude explanation for the need of religion is that dogma explains boundaries to us in no uncertain terms. You can believe wholeheartedly in the right for women to have control over their own bodies, but you cannot say that by killing an innocent living human being, you have not crossed a boundary. So the argument is not whether the boundary exists or not, but do you respect it? I can think of no prose where a more fitting word has been chosen than in "forgive those who trespass against us." Trespass. The fact that this word was chosen informs you that its author was keenly aware of boundaries.