A little while back, I read something interesting (sorry, I now forget exactly where). Muslim countries strongly complain that making them observe so-called basic human rights is unfair. After all, they claim, human rights is just one product of Christianity.
Anyways, I can already find fault with this claim. Human rights partly began, or at least got a big boost, in the French Revolution. And the French Revolution, remember, was in many ways anti-Christian (sorry, I don’t have a cite–but I assume we can all agree on this point).
So, to take what I just said into account, I will use a broader, more all-encompassing term: Christian culture. Are human rights just a natural outgrowth of Christian culture? (Remember, since the French Revolution began in a predominantly Christian country, even it could be arguably a part of [the broader term] “Christian culture”.)
No; they are in direct opposition to “Christian culture”. Christianity got to where it is by mass slaughter, terror and conquest; not because it ever had any respect whatsoever for human rights. Christianity is concerned with promoting itself above all else, and encourages its followers to ignore the real welfare of real people in the real world in favor of fantasies about souls, the Christian god and the afterlife.
Like all other forms of progress, advancing human rights requires that we sideline or reject Christianity and all other religions. Where religion is strong, human rights are weak. You can’t accomplish much of anything real if you are basing your thoughts and actions on fantasy, and religion is fantasy. Someone who is concerned about your imaginary soul is going to base their actions on that fantasy, not on your real needs.
And yes, of course there have been individual Christians who genuinely worked to improve human rights. That made them good people, but bad Christians.
Rights are granted by someone who has the authority to grant or deny them.
During Christianity God was the highest authority, so He was used to grant rights.
God-given rights.
When God was done away with, the problem presented itself that the authority apect of rights fell away. Who grants the right to rebel against a king? What are rights anyway?
The American rebels had some trouble with this. Their solution was a rather weak ‘We hold this to be self-evident’.
This is of course not authorrative enough to replace a God given right.
In order to still be able to claim rights, a new authority was found. This is the age of reason, of all kinds of discoveries about the natural world… and natural laws.
Human rights have been presented, and still are, as if they are some kind of natural law.
So yes, I think I agree they are not christian. They have been formulated exactly because people didn’t believe in a god anymore.
They’re a western concept, certainly, in that they emerge from enlightenment thinking which itself emerged within western culture. And of course western culture is profoundly marked by Christianity, even if it also produces phenomena - like the enlightenment - which directly challenge Chrsitianity.
But could I question a premise in the OP? The claim is that “Muslim countries” object to the expectation that they will observe human rights because human rights are a “product of Christianity”. I’m not sure that they do, very often - if at all. I’m of the impression that the argument is more often that human rights represent an imposition of western values and beliefs on socieities which may not share them.
That the French revolutionaries were anti-Christian, I think we can all agree with. That they were devoted to human rights seems more sketchy. Some of them put forth some nice rhetoric on the topic, to be sure. But a few thousand people might have questioned their actual dedication to human rights as their heads rolled away from the guillotine.
The American Revolution did much better when it came to actually implementing government based on individual rights, even if the early American government failed in some obvious areas, particularly slavery. And the American revolution was not anti-Christian.
I think it’s more of a question about sovereignty than “Western Culture” or “Christian Culture”. Even places like China bristle at the idea of the UN or the US coming in and saying they are violating human rights. They see it not as an affront from an outside culture not understanding that torturing humans is part of their heritage, but more that people outside China shouldn’t get to complain about Chinese handling of situations. (Nor people inside, in the case of China.)
I would say that western governments don’t really apply authority to the natural laws. I would opine that they treat it as a very tradable commodity based on their needs or desires.
The OP’s idea seems to be that fundamental rights are somehow “pro-Christian”, though. In the context of a nascent country that was basically entirely populated by Christians and agnostics, the Revolution was pretty anti-Christian. Have you seen *The Apotheosis of Washington *or whatever it’s called?
Anyway, most of the fundamental rights the Founders were demanding (and subsequently guaranteed to Le People) were either anti-Christian or completely unrelated to Christianity.
To my mind, an “anti-Christian” revolution would be something like the French or Russian: clergy arrested, murdered, or exiled; Christian buildings and monuments burned; church property seized by government; religious practice banned or restricted. None of those things occurred in the American revolution, so by what standard was it anti-Christian? Likewise, which rights were “anti-Christian”?
The founding fathers were mostly Christian with a smattering of deists, unitarians, &c… The soldiers who fought the American revolution were mostly Christian and the leaders of the state governments were mostly Christian.
It goes further than that. First is an issue of sovereignty. One of the founding principles of the UN was the non intervention in the internal affairs of other countries and China complains the USA keeps doing it to China in ways it would not accept in return. Hence charges of hypocrisy.
Furthermore, China claims all this Human Rights thing is just a convenient excuse for the USA to harass China and that western countries would violate Human Rights if it suited them.
Over many years I have had this conversation with many Chinese and have assured them that Human Rights is not just a convenient point to push China but something western culture deeply believes in as universal and sacred.
After American practices and tortures in Guantánamo and other secret camps were revealed I have changed my point of view and believe the Chinese are right and we pay lip service to Human Rights as long as it suits us but when we find it expedient we will infringe just like China does.
Further, if the nascent United States with its large Christian majorities supported democracy and freedom of speech, obviously they didn’t think so either.
I think the phrase ‘Christian culture’ is so broad as to be meaningless (as “Islamic culture” would be). There’s the Spanish Inquisition and there are Quakers. Certainly human rights advancement has been informed by Christianity in the West. Abolitionists, for example, usually based their ideas and actions in deep Christian faith, as they interpreted it.
