[dragonwriter]

> Going out on a limb here, but at one point everyone thought the world was flat.

Maybe. More likely, at one point most people weren't concerned with more than the local topography.

> Preaching that the earth is actually round, was seen as a detriment to society. So much so that people got horrifically executed for it.

I won't say definitively that that never happened, but it certainly isn't something that there is any historical evidence I've ever heard of, and it sounds a lot like flat-earth mythology, possibly conflated with (exaggeration of) the actual heliocentrism controversy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth

[jordan801]

After reading a bit, I realized I have misrecalled it. Woops. Thanks for pointing it out! :)

The referrence was to the Sun being the center of the solar system, and not the Earth. Apologies. Failure on my part. Memory is a fickle thing.