People get far to defensive on these types of subjects and take things personally, when there is really no need to. Since the scientific revolution we have changed from a mindset where our traditions and holy books know everything, and switched to a mindset which acknowledges that we do not know everything and it is up to us to discover and learn more.
But with this comes the fact that everything will always be changing to keep with what we know now. This means that you cannot fault people for making decisions in the past that we now know better about. As long as the person made the decision with the best knowledge available at the time, they were responsible. Where problems come is when people do not adapt to what we have learned.
You see this all the time in things like medicine. There are many traditional treatments that we now know are dangerous, and we have developed better alternatives to them. For example, say there is a traditional treatment that we now know has the side effect of increased child mortality. The people who used it at the time were not horrible people for risking their child's life, they could not have known any better at the time. The people who are horrible are the ones who are still using the old treatment and needlessly killing children do to the higher risk.
But our brains do not draw that distinction very well, so people who used it before we knew better get defensive and defend its use now because they feel like admitting that we now know better would somehow make them guilty in the past. This turns them from innocent victims of our lack of knowledge, to actively defending a practice which results in more children dying. It is sad, but we need to compassion if we want to break these cycles.
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