Without laws like the Ten Commandments, our existence here on this earth would be pretty pathetic. What if you could not rely on people to tell you the truth? Or not to steal from you? What if we were not expected to respect our parents, and we all started out with cynicism and mistrust of all authority? What if the “I love you” between partners was allowed to mean nothing? What if covetousness, which Rene Girard calls “mimetic rivalry,” was encouraged to grow unstopped, as it is in capitalist countries today? Such shapelessness would be the death of any civilization or any kind of trustworthy
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