History isn’t morality. - Nancy Kress

And wasn’t that a common pattern in human history! Greedy religious orders, wanting to keep power for themselves, using customs and myth and threats and murder to keep the people in line and then making them believe it was all for their own good so they wouldn’t challenge the supremacy of the priesthood. Some political thinker of a few centuries ago had nailed it exactly: “Religion is the opiate of the people.”

How to reasonably object to artificiality, when all of anthropology spotlighted how artificial all cultural institutions actually were?

It takes two people to make a human tie. But only one to break it.