I learned about cultural taboos among some ethnic groups of central Africa when it comes to eating chimpanzee meat because of their similarity to humans. For instance, among the Bayombe of the DRC and the Bakota of Gabon, eating apes is culturally prohibited for fear that women will give birth to children with a simian face. In the Equateur region of the former Belgian Congo, the bonobo was considered a human that had been transformed in the distant past. In some ethnicities in Congo-Brazzaville, gorillas were considered a reincarnation of the Bantu, while chimpanzees were thought to be similarly related to the Baka Pygmies.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"