The Problem of Profanity . . . lest there be any fornicator or profane person like Esau, who for one morsel of food sold his birthright.Hebrews 12:16 To be profane is to choose the immediate satisfaction of the temporal over the more distant value of the spiritual. Profanity is worshiping the wrong thing, honoring the secular in such a way as to dishonor the sacred. Irreverent language constitutes "profanity," of course, but that is only one symptom of the problem. In the larger sense, the profane person is one like Esau who trades away great intangible privileges for the...