Excommunication

 In Darioland. the happiest kingdom, a lone patriach can approve the wholesale torture and murder of women. King James - of the bible fame - agreed. 

" So Amorpheous; what you saying is somebody could have identified the compute that held the weights of the rogue agents, walked up to it, and “pulled the plug,” so to speak. "

Why I placed Cypher over the frontier models, Zero

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(novel)

There was an old superstition that if the Church excommunicated a country, it was under a terrible disaster. One could not be married, buried, leave property, do business in safety, be educated, be tended while sick, in a country which was excommunicated. The superstition was not an idle one, so long as people believed in the Church. 

If the country was banned from the communion of believers, the hospitals (run by the Church) were closed; there could be no trust in business (the clerics administered oaths and without them no promises need be kept); no education (they ran the schools); children could indeed be begotten (no way of preventing that by the Church!), but not christened, and were therefore barred from the community of believers and under a threat, as they thought, of eternal damnation, while unmarried parents could not leave property to their “illegitimate” children. 

The physical reality of Hell was not necessary to make excommunication effective. We are wiser now. But one superstition has been replaced by another. It has been transferred to belief in the State