I would want to broaden that though, to ‘a gradual rejection of unjustified ideas’. People demanding good reasons to accept their lot in life, evidence for assertions about the natural world etc. The prevailing Christian culture was weakened by this attitude as were the dominant social hierarchies and many pre-scientific philosophies. I regard the whole thing as a general trend towards increased rationalism.
I would agree with this bit. Although not only when convenient, but also under threat, like with the mentioned Magna Carta.
I don’t make a special distinction between human-rights workers-rights or whatever-rights. Rights are indeed relinquished by those in power. Be that a king a ‘government’ , a landowner an employer or what have you.
That said, I definitely think social factors provided the most significant push. When people rejected the idea thatthey and all their dependants were destined to miserable servitude for ever, they were more inclined to question other received wisdoms.
Indeed, or the church.
It’s almost like Ancient Greece never happened. Perhaps Al Gore invented Human Rights?
And the Magna Carta was English, not Christian. Some of the rights in it (which were only for nobles, remember) like trial by a jury of your peers are not the case in other equally Christian countries.
I believe there are Islamic courts also. That powerful rulers violate them is not a matter of religion.
Henry VIII had no trouble taking church lands. In Elizabethan times Catholics found preaching found their heads on post. Is there really a lot of difference between a monarch jailing someone because he feels like it and him forcing the law writers to write laws to allow him to do so “legally?”
If rights grew out of Christian culture, it sure took them a long time to implement them. (And the prime advocates of Christian culture are battling against human rights even today.)
It’s more accurate to say that human rights are a result of the secularization of once-Christian cultures. The less sway the Bible held over people, the more they had to establish a firm moral foundation to replace it with. Human rights are a result of humanism, which is not a rejection of Christianity, but more an ignoring of it. Also, plenty of Muslims and other non-Christians are for human rights. Most of them, probably. Just not the Iranian UN ambassador, apparently.
Still, why does it seem like human rights are only embraced by peoples with a Christian cultural heritage? I can’t think of any place in the Muslim world that I would trust to recognize the rights of a non-believer (or any kind of minority, really). Many of them will explicitly refuse to do so. As for Asian countries (China, Japan, etc), they operate on a “society first” premise that would seem to be incompatible with the concept of human rights (which after all are limits on the level of control a government is allowed to exert on its people).
Errrr, sorry what?
The Arab conquests of the seventh century took over and maintained the infrastructures of two functioning empires, empires which many Arabs had been part off (Rome and Persia both had Arabs within their borders even before the 630’s). And the inavsions were led by people who mostly were not tribal, except perhaps in a nominal sense, they came from settled urban cities, and regions, like Mecca, Yathrib (npw Medinah), Taif and Yemen
Persia was not autocratic in the least, they pretty much left you alone, after conquering you. And that ignores places like India or the Far East.
UDHR is lets face it not particularly original and forced through by representatives of nations who at the time (and still to an extent) excelled in breaching it.
They are the outgrowth of Enlightenment thinking:
That basic human freedoms are inalienable.
Those thinkers may have inserted a “creator” for the purposes of limiting government’s potential to suspend the rights of man, but as a concept human rights come from secular, rational thought.
It is true that many of the rights that we consider basic came to be accepted in recent times, but IMHO thinking that Christianity came with those is not the whole history.
The ancient Babylonians came up with things like the idea of minimum wage and the presumption of innocence. On the other hand they had very harsh and barbaric punishments.
The ancient Persians can point to Cyrus the Great as another great figure that did not depend on Christian culture:
Don’t hurt yourself getting your arm far enough back to start patting, OP…
I agree with Stoneburg that most advances have been in spite of organized religion rather than caused by it. A great read is “The Demon Haunted World” by Carl Sagan. In it he touches on a long history of superstition, violence, and trampling of human rights. From the witch hunts in Europe, and the torture and murder of vast numbers of people all in the name of god, to modern day morality laws, the concept is the same. There can be no human liberty in a system where civil law is predicated on religion.
Our constitution protects against freedom from religion more so than guaranteeing freedom of religion. Our penal code is not in place to uphold the 10 commandments. And while on that topic, our founding fathers were not seeking to establish a Christian nation per se. Do some concepts from Christianity or any other religion ring true in the public sector? Absolutely. But many are based on antiquated thinking and we have evolved past it.
Many of the struggles and battles in our country have been a result of the movement away from so called Christian ideals. Political debates, rather than being about things that matter, have sucked up time and resources for things such as SSM and marijuana. The very arguments against these things are based on superstition, nonsense, and people that feel everyone should live just like they do. Anyone on that side of the fence has yet to demonstrate a single valid argument against it, and eventually human rights prevail.
To continue would be to open many cans of worms and to go off topic, so I shall stop.
I think that gets it backwards. If you’re a wealthy landowner in ancient Egypt, Greece, or Rome, medieval China or Arabia, or the antebellum South, your work is done by slaves. If you want to increase your profits, you can whip your slaves harder or otherwise drive them to work more.
If you’re a wealthy owner in the northern United States circa 1820, your work is done by employees. You can drive driving your employees harder, but they might quit or demand higher wages. If you want to increase your profits, your best bet is to invent new technology that replaces your workers or increases their productivity, and to quickly adopt any technology that’s invented by someone else.
Or house them at their own expense, pay them in company scrip, and make them purchase from the company store, using the scrip that no one else will take, so they become indebted and re-enslaved.
And this didn’t end with the Civil War, either. It was in practice as late as living memory, when Cesar Chavez fought against it.
Capitalism – and Christianity – are not created for the benefit of the majority of the populace. Human Rights have become a highly regarded moral touchstone despite the efforts of the ruling classes.
The vast majority of the advances of the Industrial Revolution came from Britain, where workers had almost no rights in 1820. Most of them were invented by the laboring classes, too, or at least by people with no direct interest in productivity.
Regardless of Christianity’s influence in creating human rights, Christianity (and religion in general, really) have to be thoroughly separated from governance if we want to preserve human rights. Sure, Chris, take your bow, claim the credit, whatever… and get the fuck off the stage.
So it turns out that Christian Enlightenment America had slavery of a particularly brutal kind. Now explain to me again how human rights are a direct outgrowth of Christianity, given that Christian Europe and America had slavery until the 1800s. By my count that’s 1800 years before the human rights implicit in the Christian religion managed to reveal themselves.
Human rights haven’t exactly been a universal feature of European or Christian countries. You might remember a little disagreement in the 1930s that caused some trouble. Christian Spain just managed to get rid of fascism in 1975.
Israel does pretty well for itself.