[TheRaisin]

Has anyone ever read a short story called The Lottery? It makes an excellent point about human nature. The mention of stoning brought it to mind.

Basically it's about this village where every year they have this lottery, and for most of the story you have no idea what it's about. All you know is that the entire town participates and no one really remembers how it got started or anything, and they've forgotten all the traditions and ceremonial things that went along with it but they still do it just out of habit. Anyway, at the very end it turns out the person selected is then stoned to death by the rest of the village.

Cool story. It kind of relates to the topic of religion. Like, originally the whole "don't eat pork!" thing was actually just a health precaution (obviously food preparation and preservation wasn't perfect five thousand years ago), but people did it for so long that it basically became part of the Jewish religion. It no longer makes much sense, but it's practiced anyway.