Rohan Monteiro

 On occasion while I am doom scrolling Reddit, i come across a post that makes me stop, read and then re-read again, because of how insightful it is. The following was on r/AskHistorians . It felt like a well-explained summary and I decided to save it and re-post it here. I did not write the below, though I wish I did. ***** Can someone explain the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?   Hi, I’ll take a stab at giving a relatively short explanation that tries to get to the root of the problem. While people often make the mistake of thinking the Israel Palestinian conflict is ancient, you don’t have to go back thousands of years to understand it, but you do have to go back over 100, to the late 1800s in Europe to really understand the origins of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. In this time period, the majority of the world’s Jewish population lives in Europe. While in lots of parts of Europe Jews are integrated into society and relatively successful, basically everywhe...

 I was chatting with my 10 year old on the bus to school and the 10 commandments came up. for context, my daughter age 8 has a quiz at church and I wanted to make sure she was up to date. His question " Why do the commandments not include something like " don't torture people?" Which honestly is a great question that I never thought of when I was a kid. I explained it with  the rationale about how all bronze age religions were a bit bloodthirsty - he's been listening to 'Greeking out' and so he knew specific examples of human sacrifice in Greek mythology as well - Agamemnon's daughter, the offering to the minotaur etc. But it got me thinking - the original draft was actually not too great - it focusses mainly on worship rules and a few core social prohibitions (murder, theft, adultery, lying). They do not explicitly address several ethical issues modern societies consider fundamental—such as slavery, torture, equality of persons, or treatment of outs...