The xenophobia, racism, and patriarchy that rules long before the advent of the nation-state, when it arrived, was just a more efficient means to raise the death toll of narratives. The Old Testament is only the best known of these vehicles of in-group bonding and out-group enmity. As you'll see, stories emerged in human prehistory as practices that were able to move humans from the bottom of the food chain on the African savanna to the top in a matter of a thousand centuries or so. These cultural practices were selected for owing to their effectiveness, first in killing large animals and then, in killing -- or even worse, enslaving -- other humans