More than a hundred years ago, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim wrote that the defining feature of religious thought—and, I’d argue, many other belief systems—is “the division of the world into two domains, one containing all that is sacred and the other all that is profane.”10 We don’t always agree on the boundaries between those domains. But when we forsake what we believe is sacred for what we believe is profane, regret is the consequence.
