How strange is it to remember 7 million years?

I was watching "2 1/2 men" the pilot of this new season's show when Charlie's daughter comes back. (if you haven't seen it yet and intend to I won't spoil what happens here).

Anyway, this got me to thinking about all this and realizing how things often were hundreds and thousands of years ago. For example, what is really interesting compared to now is that any sex outside of a marriage was often punishable by death. So, there really wasn't any kind of sex outside of a marriage that was permissible. So, anyone who had sex outside of marriage often didn't talk about it at all.

If you are potentially going to die because of sex outside of marriage you are really going to be careful who you tell about it. So, in this context whether this was an opposite sex relationship or whether this was a same sex relationship or a combination of both at the same time it was all in the same category of "potentially fatal" in it's outcome. So,  people worried a lot about being killed and anyone who found out about any of this often blackmailed people the rest of their lives regarding things like this.

So, this kind of thing often made people crazy. Either they became crazy from wanting someone and not having them because they didn't want to die or they went crazy from worrying about someone finding out about it and blackmailing them and them being killed in some awful way. So, this was true of both men and women but worse always for women because often they were not trained to physically defend themselves if someone found out. Because it wasn't a legal justice system that would kill them, it was whoever was nearby that found out.

In this context, what often happens in the middle east today makes a lot more sense today when lovers are often beheaded for being together without the consent of the father or fathers in middle eastern countries. It's just that this way of doing things never changed there.

So, one point of view is that it is archaic and cruel and the other point of view would be that this is the way things used to be for everyone from the Middle east up through Europe and into Russia. So, this was just how things were done to some degree even into China too.