But the Enlightenment being the product of the West and the then accepted virtues of Christianity (new and dangerous 1500 years prior) and the resulting freedoms, but also the abuses of Christendom.
Why abuses of "Christendom"? Were the actions of King John, against which the barons rebelled with the Magna Carta, abuses of some prior "Christian" notion of what the balance of power between monarchs and aristocrats ought to look like? When Locke argued against Hobbes that indeed citizens do have the right to overthrow a sovereign who acts without regard for their rights, was he upholding some prior "Christian" doctrine about the political rights of citizens relative to sovereigns? Why didn't Jesus declare that all Roman subjects ought to have equal political rights and be empowered to effect the replacement of 'Caesar' with someone else, if these were such critical corollary precepts of the religion he founded?
ANY ideology or sentiment entertaining the notion that a group of people collectively bear loyalties towards each other 'greater' than those arising from their shared allegiance to a sovereign--and there are many such ideologies and sentiments, from tribalism to monotheism to nationalism and beyond--will be considered "dangerous" by authoritarian rulers, particularly if they prove unamenable to adaptation by said rulers to their benefit.
Another Christian concept, no less crazy: the concept of equality of souls before God. This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights."
-- Nietzsche
Somehow I suspect you're quoting Nietzsche opportunistically here, and without regard for his broader views on the role of religion in shaping culture. Yes, Nietzsche did write that (as part of a fragmentary passage in his journals, not in the context of a developed argument in a published work); he also argued, at much greater length, that both Judaism and Christianity were "slave moralities" strategically propagated by their founders for the express purpose of maintaining collective self-valuation in the face of humiliation and oppression, by reframing the qualities associated with slavedom as virtues--an idea I suspect you'd be far less sympathetic to. Like Kierkegaard or Camus, Nietzsche was as much poet and storyteller as philosopher, and his vision of intellectual history is filled with thought-provoking, often brilliantly eloquently put, yet also undeniably eccentric and quixotic leaps of metaphor. And he lived and wrote during the post-Enlightenment ferment of late 19th-century Europe, in the long political shadow of Locke's particular formulation of rights doctrine; any thinker looking to interrogate such ideas had no choice but to do so at least partially on Locke's terms, even if only to reject them. This isolated quote is of no use as 'proof' that Christianity is in itself the source of "all theories of equal rights."
Constantine legalized Christianity in 313 AD opening up Western civilization to the Christian ideas of:
1) the notion of something greater than the State or Caesar
2) morality being based on something objective and not the subjective whims of humans
3) the rejection of Paganism
4) equality before God (Galatians 3:28 being just one example)
5) criticism of slavery
6) individual freedom (hinted at by Socrates)
1) As I already commented a couple paragraphs above, this was not a new idea. Nor did it prove immune to self-serving imperial expropriation, which Constantine in fact "opened it up to." Much as, for example, Samuel had done for Judaism, transforming a clan-based society into a theocratic monarchy.
2) As opposed to the teachings of who or what? Thrasymachus in Plato's
Republic? Aristotle didn't teach this, neither did Seneca, neither did Judaism...just for starters.
3) So what? Paganism makes authoritarianism, slavery, legally institutionalized patriarchy, etc. inevitable?
4) We are talking in this thread about legal and political equality. Not the metaphysical equality (to be realized only in the afterlife) professed by those who meanwhile adopt a quietist stance on real-world inequality. Again to use a Jewish example: pre-Classical Judaism taught that all nations were equally God's 'children' and that God has great plans for many of them; but that clearly didn't stop Jews from declaring that God doesn't give a damn and in fact approves of it when those who are more advanced in virtue conquer and rule over those who are deemed morally deficient. Nonetheless conquered peoples were allowed to continue operating according to their own laws, so long as this didn't necessitate Jewish participation in anything which violated Jewish law.
5) Not to any unique or unprecedented degree, not at all. He forbade branding of slaves on their faces and the breakup of slave families (save for infants, who unlike his pagan predecessor Diocletian he permitted to be sold); that's about it. Muhammad also introduced several reforms that modestly improved the legal and social standing of slaves; would you say based on that that abolitionism is an "Islamic" idea?
6) You cannot meaningfully talk about true individual liberty before the emergence of a cultural ethos characterized by individualism, and there's no way you could characterize any culture in the world at that time as individualistic.
But I'd like to think that Christianity grew from an outlawed cult into the dominate world-view not only because of a theology that seemed more relevant to people's lives but also because the philosophy seemed to point the way forward.
Well, I'm sure you'd
like to think that...I'd like to think the Jewish belief that God's indivisibility and immanence entails universal human obligations to pursue justice for others continues to have a vital role to play in all kinds of social justice campaigns, too. But just because some particular person or persons associated with a religion happened to author some work(s) of lastingly enduring influence on certain modern political, social or cultural institutions, doesn't mean that we can cite that as "validation" of the religion or its broader intellectual system in general. Nor that if we reject some particular idea associated with it, then all the other ideological influences that tradition has had on us are doomed to come crashing down like a house of cards.
Part of that philosophy is that humans are distinct from the other creatures.
But no traditional worldview argues otherwise; the closest thing to an 'opposite' would be the various religions in which sacred status is ascribed to certain particular animals (which doesn't mean those animals are 'treated like people' in practice). In
some strains of Hinduism and its descendant religions, vegetarianism and related rejection of products derived from the killing of animals are practiced, but this is understood as part of the broader cultivation of
ahimsa, the virtue of nonviolence, rather than a consequence of theological assertions concerning the metaphysical equality of humans and animals. For that matter, none of the actual philosophers affiliated with animal rights advocacy argue that humans are 'indistinct' from animals either, or that we should put animal lives before human lives when the two come into direct contest.
Women's rights evolved through marriage first, from being mostly arranged to being consensual.
I wouldn't describe marriage, in Western history or any other, as a device likely adopted for furthering 'women's rights' as such; rather, by institutionalizing
paternal responsibility for one's children, it ensured pregnant women's families wouldn't be strapped with responsibility for them, while also providing opportunities for the forging of mutually profitable ties between prospective spouses' families. As such it's unsurprising that in Western history, arranged marriage lasted much longer among the aristocracy than anyone else; not because they were 'less enlightened' or 'less Christian,' but because they simply had more to gain (or lose) where marriage contracts were concerned.
And slavery, while never disappearing, certainly became less common. Economies in Europe were no longer based on the practice. And people were arguing against it. The Catholic church prohibiting it in medieval times.
What specific prohibition are you referring to there? I think the rise of serfdom as the primary means of organizing production was at least as important as the rise of individualism and the development of liberal democracy in laying the grounds for mass receptivity to a reconsideration of the morality of slavery. Serfdom may have been no great improvement from a quality-of-life standpoint but, roughly put, it at least got the higher-ups largely out of the habit of perceiving those who did their dirty work as useful pieces of product who could be bought and sold in their person. Nonetheless, slavery (not of Christians, granted--but many societies historically limited their slave pool to 'Others') remained a feature of medieval European life; many of the Crusaders brought (Muslim) slaves back with them from the 'Holy Land,' for instance. If anything, the arrival of the colonial era was a setback for any 'progress' the 'Christian world' could've been said to have made concerning slavery--although, precisely because of the new ways in which these colonial slaveholders justified their mass enslavement of conquered peoples (along racial lines: the 'innate heathenness' of
Indios and Africans), new arguments against such hierarchical classifications of humans emerged in response...the School of Salamanca, for example.
My only premise, simple as it may be, is that human rights arose from Western Civilization and Western Civilization has been predominately Christian. And in fact today, the freest peoples live in predominantly Christian countries or countries one time ruled or rebuilt by such.
Indeed, it may be a bit too simple; it is a correlation=causation premise, and those are always suspect. Might the historical contrasts to the 'progress' of human rights in the non-Western-yet-predominantly-Christian former empire of Ethiopia, and the both-Western(?)-and-predominantly-Christian former empire of Russia, be relevant here? Why did Ethiopia fail to produce a Locke, Montesquieu or Hegel despite many centuries of Christian rule; why did Christian Russia remain so pervasively characterized politically by authoritarianism at the center and collectivism at the popular level--yes, even before socialism!--while constitutional republicanism and individualism were progressing dramatically in Western Europe? Is it possible that the historical trajectory of Western European political thought is simply unique in ways that defy easy causative attribution to any one cultural institution?
Your premise seems to be that the next evolution in human rights is the abandonment of Judeo-Christian philosophy and an embracement of secularism and scientism.
'Secularism' and 'scientism' emerged from the 'Judeo-Christian' world just as surely as liberal democracy did, and like liberal democracy bear the imprint of all kinds of decidedly non-theological forces at work in their cultural milieu of origin: power struggles between the landed classes and the monarchy; the opening up to new (or in many cases old) ideas through increased international trade; technological and scientific advancements fundamentally driven by profit motives but increasingly funded by an ascendant merchant class rather than Church or State; etc. etc. Darwin wasn't causally determined as an intellectual by a deep-seated desire to 'stick it' to the Church any more than Locke was, even though both of them argued for things that made some religious authorities very angry.
Likewise, the proposition that perhaps animals warrant certain limited legal rights emerges not from a drive to 'torpedo' Christianity nor the basic political values you're attempting to credit it with, but rather from an honest evaluation of the existing philosophical justifications for rights (and whom we must extend them to) which leads, for some, to the conclusion that these justifications cannot be rationally reconciled with an absolute denial of rights to all animals. In light of which I must point out that you still have not articulated a *reason-based* line of argument as to why all humans deserve rights independent of their mental or physical capacities, yet all animals categorically do not. "All people are equal in the eyes of God" is--at best--an argument why if you're going to grant rights to some people you must grant them to all people. It does not answer the questions, why must we grant people specific legal rights at all, and how does the answer to that 'why' innately rule out granting any rights whatsoever to animals.