ᚩ ᛭ ᛉ ᛭ ᛟ

I've known for a long time that 1st-cousin marriage made up the majority of marriages in the Islamic Middle East (this has only begun to change in the past couple of decades, and cousin marriages still represent about half of all marriages there). But I didn't know just how screwed-up buggering your own cousin makes your descendants. Just two to three generations of cousin marriage is enough to lower IQ by one full standard deviation. That means a drop from "average" to "subnormal" to "mentally handicapped" can take place inside one century of inbreeding. Middle Easterners have been plagued by this under the yoke of Islam for one and a half thousand years.

For something which claims to be the final word of God, you'd think He would have had something to say on the matter.

This strikes me as having been written by AI.

Anyway, it has one good notion: '... the primary human vocation was participation in God rather than management of the world. Within that framework, extended prayer was not a discipline imposed against human nature. It was an expression of what human nature was for."

This is one of those "obvious once it's heard" statements. The overarching thing you knew but just needed articulated.