In other words: U.S. "Family" Court

The French. Bleh

The Enlightenment was a lie though. Now men can pretend to be women and states enslave their citizens and kill them.

Into the mid 1800's. Andrew Jackson fought quite a few

Mere Duels, yes. But those were for matters of simple "honor". "You've gravely insulted or defamed my person in some 'unforgivable' way, so I'm entitled (by this old-fashioned cultural custom we still retain as a last-ditch option for serious disputes between citizens) to demand a chance for 'legal' retribution." In cases like that, it's not so much whether anyone's in doubt or disagreement about what happened. Very often the fact that *no one* is in doubt about something *said very publicly,* is exactly why it's such an affront. The only thing then left to decide is what the recipient of the offense is willing to do about it, if he feels it's serious enough. No, the specific scenario under discussion here, is a very old, very crude form of *legal trial,* to "discover the Truth". When two completely different versions of events are alleged. Two people accusing each other of lying, but there's no real evidence sufficient to prove anything one way or the other. So, if they simply *fight* for it, the old religious thinking went: Then God (or, "the gods", in the more ancient pre-Christian era) will give the victory to the "righteous" party. So he's not saying it's the combat part, the actual Duel itself that was banned or fallen out of favor. He's saying the whole cultural shift around the Renaissance, the new ideas about rationality and "scientific" thinking, was now beginning to demand facts that were, y'know, actual "facts". Actually provable in some philosophically reasonable way. The old idea that God would expose or "prove" the hidden facts for us when we couldn't, by intervening to control the outcome of a contest of single combat, was starting to sound like absurdly backward superstition, to most "modern" thinking people.

It was the last duel (trial by combat) that determined guilt or innocence in a crime. It wasn't the last time two people fought to the death though... it just became a matter of "satisfaction" in a dispute, not a matter of guilt or innocence in a charge.

Traditional duels have happened up through the 1960’s in many places. Videos of these ‘touch’ duels can be seen on KZfaq.

@@boatratthe Catholic Church was critical of dueling throughout medieval history. That being said there were probably some dunces who believed that God would give the innocent party victory.