I don't mean so much specifically in wifebeating cases, just as a concept that our society has integrated, even the non-Christian parts. The plucky underdog and all that...

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I don't know. I suspect all societies enjoy underdogs. It makes for better stories than "the big favourite won. Again."

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Vikings?

Possibly the underdog thing was a bad comparison (though it is possile to interpret the stories in different ways - he won because he was the good guy, he won because that's survival of the fittest and from now on he's the boss, he won because the gods liked him etc.), but Christianity as a slave religion does put a lot of emphasis on the virtue of the oppressed. In some other religions/societies you were oppressed because you deserved it. I remember in Lady Murasaki's diary she attributes her having been born a woman to bad karma left over from previous lives, and concludes that she'll have to be good and undergo at least one more reincarnation (as a guy) before she can enter paradise.

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