Cooperation was, in the long run, a more powerful evolutionary strategy than violence, once a species was high-tech. - Nancy Kress

By pure chance then, by pure chance now. Unfair.
But he’d always known that was true of the universe.

Judge not. No culture was better than another, no culture should be deemed in need of uplifting. Crap! It was the worst kind of moral laziness masquerading as cultural relativism.

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.”