Moral Boundaries News Today

Writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once said that he remembered hearing the older folks comment on the great disasters that had befallen Russia. "Men have forgotten God; thats why all this has happened," they said. It was true then, and its true now.

Where do you go when there are no more moral lines to cross? When all the boundaries have been pushed away and explicitness has been taken to its farthest degree, you dont achieve freedom – you get chaos and lawlessness.

Something novel happened during this century’s first decade: Social scientists (re)discovered the nonreligious. Call it “reaching critical ma ss” or a “tipping point,” but suddenly quite a few researchers in quite a few places began to focus their attention directly on the nonreligious—not just ...