It's all about Easter. The church chose a mildly ridiculous, astronomically difficult and contentious definition of Easter: the first Sunday after the first fu

It's all about Easter. The church chose a mildly ridiculous, astronomically difficult and contentious definition of Easter: the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox. So it combines 3 complex systems: sun, moon and calendar. Religious extremism and pedantry increased the priority of accuracy and agreement. For some reason, Christians argued (fought wars) over the definition of Easter, and then regarded anyone picking the wrong day as a malevolent heretic. I imagine Easter could be one of the issues that led Swift to write the Lilliputian egg dispute in Gulliver's Travels.