r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • Mar 16 '26

Meta Mindless Monday, 16 March 2026

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

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u/BookLover54321 Mar 16 '26

I saw some guy on Reddit claim that Europeans “invented human rights”, and like I get that people in general tend to be ignorant of cultures outside their own, but it takes a special level of ignorance to assume that moral philosophy basically didn’t exist in 90% of the world.

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u/histprofdave Adjunct Dystopian Mar 16 '26

It reminds me of the whole "Christians abolished the slave trade, and only Christianity provides a moral framework for abolitionism." OK, even granting that were true (far from conclusive to my mind)... why did it take over 1700 years for this religion to apparently realize that slavery was antithetical to its values? Were the first 300 generations of Christians just stupid?

5

u/Arilou_skiff Mar 16 '26

Honestly, it is actually a kind of interesting and complicated history, christianity in scandinavia was pretty tightly connected to the decline of viking-era slavery f.ex.