DO you realize you’re falling into the black white grey fallacy? Parables such a

DO you realize you’re falling into the black white grey fallacy? Parables such as this serve to emphasize causal necessity that must be remembered over time. Your claim that it was manipulation was actuall a demonstration of sacrifice – which if you don’t understand, was both the primary means of demonstrating loyalty not on ly to one another, to the state, but to the gods.
Never use your frame of reference to interpret the past.
If you read the original greek you realize the world was so pervasively violent for any and all, and starvation was always so dear a risk, that loyalty and self sacrifice we call heroism were necdessary for the preservation of group cohesion by a small pouplation on the edge of the bronze age expansion, who had to resist the hordes of the less behaviorally advanced people of the middle east. (Then as now.)

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