The notion that the Church's prohibition against cousin-marriage was "accidental," a cynical scam to get rich, is grotesquely reductive. The reason for it lay in a sacral understanding of marriage fundamental to Christian theology from the time of Paul.
"The insistence of scripture that a man & a woman, whenever they took to the marital bed, were joined as Christ & his Church were joined, becoming one flesh, gave to both a rare dignity... It was consent, not coercion that constituted the only proper foundation of a marriage."
"The Church, by pledging itself to this conviction, and putting it into law, was treading on the toes of patriarchs everywhere." #Dominion
Obviously, @danieldennett is going to view the Christian theology of marriage as superstitious nonsense. But, as he also acknowledges, if researchers are properly to understand values & beliefs alien to them, then they have to take them seriously. Sneering at them is not enough.
Coincidentally, I am in the midst of a book by Greg Anderson, who argues just this point with reference to ancient Athens: how difficult "the peculiarly materialist, anthropocentrist, secularist & individualist" character of contemporary academia makes understanding the Greeks.
"We need a historicism that allows us to recognise that Olympian gods were just as self-evidently real to the Athenians as a free market economy is to ourselves."
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