The life cycle of a taboo

'I heard you want your country back?'

Continued from here

Imagine yourself as a conservative-minded Roman, living in the declining years of the empire; in your youth you recall laughing about these weirdos who worship some criminal executed in the middle of nowhere; by the time you hit middle age, you find your colleagues, friends and even children chastising you for mocking His name; what, you as well? By your declining years you come to see, with bemused despair, that you can now get in trouble with the law for making fun of this guy!

Taboos, when one lives in the thick of them, can appear eternal and unbreakable, but they must start somewhere. For hundreds of years Christian morality held an iron grip over the European mind and anti-blasphemy norms were so embedded as to be second nature, but those who experienced their takeover would have seen them emerge in a single lifetime.

All societies develop taboos of sorts. Hindus created rules about eating cows, perhaps to avoid the temptation to slaughter the animal whose milk is needed for long-term survival; Jews developed an aversion to eating pigs, animals which are omnivorous and so a cannibalism risk (although the anthropological explanations for these traditions are debated).