Toto

Stark explains the rise of Christianity as due in part to the social connections and social services provided by the early church. But this is not the same as legal equality. The church called for slave masters to be fairer and kinder to their slaves, not for the slaves to be free.

Dinesh D'Souza is a mouthpiece of the religious right. His entire career has been spent in right wing foundations and Republican politics. The book you cite is paid political propaganda, which is the most polite thing I can say about D'Souza. Please do not try to use him as an authority on history or religion.

You seem to have picked up this quote from D'Souza. Nietzsche's views are actually complex, and cannot be summarized in a soundbite like this.

Christianity has a very mixed record on human rights and compassion, tending more toward violations of human rights.

I would suggest that it is more accurate to see the origins of modern human rights in the Enlightenment; after philosophers decided that equality was a good thing, they found justification in Christian doctrine, or reshaped Christian doctrine.

But Christianity can be used to support dictatorships or fascism as easily as democracy, as you can see from recent history.

What is the purpose of this thread? Does anyone seriously think that Christians invented human rights?

Petergdi

There is an interesting bit in the Jewish Encyclopedia article Gilyonim.

This does seem to suggest that some Jews understood the Gospel of early Jewish Christians to include a requirement for social-economic equity between the sexes as well as spiritual equality

Peter.

neilgodfrey

Is there any place in the Bible that affords rights to anyone solely on the grounds that one is a human being?

The bible speaks of privileges, responsibilities, duties, threats and rewards, but rights?

Certain social and gender barriers are broken down in some places in the bible, but only for fellow-believers and in specific contexts. People are treated and expect to be treated according to their faith or obedience, not their humanity, throughout the bible.

We owe more to John Locke and Thomas Paine than anything in the Bible for the notion of "rights" contingent upon one's "humanity".

Neil

Joan of Bark

Admittedly, this passage certainly supports the idea of total equality, at least from a religious perspective. Still, as Toto also points out, the interpolations in 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy contradict Galatians. (Hey, a Biblical contradiction! What are the chances?)

As for any claims that this alleged 'humanity' made Christianity so attractive ... well, I think a better case could be made for the allure of Christianity being due to the rewards offered. What other religion claimed that despite all your suffering on Earth, you would go to an eternal paradise after death? This would be a very appealing thought for people who were watching the corrupt and irreligious living it up. Christianity has never been a hard sell.

neilgodfrey

There is no hint of "human rights" in Galatians 3:28. Human rights, by definition, are rights that are accorded exclusively on the basis of one being human. Galatians 3:28 is restricted to those "in Christ Jesus". Tough luck for Buddhists and Moslems and atheists.

Many clubs and races and social groupings will accord -- and have always accorded throughout history -- certain equalities to their own members. But the idea of extending certain equalities solely on the basis of being human is nowhere found in the Bible as far as I can recall.

It is a mistake to equate certain equalities -- e.g. gender or racial -- with "human rights" if they are restricted to those who belong to the Grand Order of Cross-Eyed Scarlet Mooses or Christians or politically correct Aryans or anything other than one's being simply human.

Neil

KrisK10

Toto,

Thanks for the comments. Nietzsche's philosophy's might be difficult, but his comments attributing equal rights to Christianity seems pretty clear cut. How else could one possibly take it? --- “Another Christian concept, no less crazy, has passed even more deeply into the tissue of modernity: the concept of the ‘equality of souls before God.’ This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights: mankind was first taught to stammer the proposition of equality in a religious context, and only later was it made into morality” (The Will to Power).

Seems to me that D'Souza has a point no matter his bias or funding. I'm not saying that Christianity introduced democracy in the first century. I'm just saying that they did things like you said, "call[ing] for slave masters to be fairer and kinder to their slaves". This kind of relationship toward other people gained momentum in Christianity and contributed to its growth (per Rodney Stark). I'm merely suggesting that this type of ethic toward others more or less continued and was a cornerstone of western culture (and some other cultures as well) and that it is a required ingredient for the idea of human rights. I'm suggesting that the compassion in Christianity is the primary venue with which the ideas of human rights were built on in our society. Even if those of the enlightenment were not themselves Christian, they were a product of a Christian society that assumed a certain way to treat and view each other. If Christianity was not formative in the idea of human rights, then why don't the first large successes in human rights and democracy pop up in some other culture first? Seems to me that it is significant that a Christian culture is the one that got it going first on a large scale.

Kris

Ben C Smith

I think they did. For a while.

That is exactly what I think. I think this layer lasted about one generation.

I certainly agree that Christianity, particularly in its more mainline forms, has tended to follow rather than lead on important social reforms. That is to our shame.

However, there are indisputable bright spots where Christians took a leading role. The Quakers stood against slavery from the start, for example. The diary of John Woolman is an absolute inspiration in this regard (as well as in others).

Ben.

gstafleu

Nietzsche was discussing his perceptions of the church as it was in his days. Religion, as the opium of the people, served to make the masses subservient to their masters. What Nietzsche was proposing went more in the way of individual self determination. This means that one should not attribute too much historical significance to his words. IOW, one cannot derive from it much more than that Nietzsche thought of then-current Christianity as opium of the people, luring them into subservience by surrendering their will to power to the church.

The idea of human rights is, if anything, the opposite of what Nietzsche said the church was trying to achieve: human rights is more like the will to power (what we call self-determination, the freedom to do as you like constrained by your effect on others) then it is like subservience to the church. So D'Souza doesn't really have a point--rather he just undermined his thesis.

Gerard Stafleu

KrisK10

Gerard,

You lost me there. How does Nietzsche's statement undermine D'Souza's thesis? I hear all you're saying about Nietzsche's objection to church power and such, but he seems clearly to have concluded that Christianity was the "prototype of all theories of equal rights." Nietzsche may be wrong, but can there really be any doubt what he thinks?

Kris

gstafleu

I think he thinks something different than you think he thinks . Now I'm on dangerous ground here, because I'm not a Nietzsche expert. But from the little I've read from him (a bit of Thus Spoke Zarathustra) and from what I've read about him, when he speaks of "equality" as proposed by the Church, that equality is an equality of insignificance. Sure, everyone is "equal," but only in the sense that nobody should follow a path of individual development. Rather, people all should equally subject to the Church (or to the prevailing culture). An important bit of human rights is usually (certainly where American sensibilities are involved) that people should be free to follow their own direction. This, I think, is (in part) what Nietzsche meant with will to power: the freedom, empowerment, to determine your own destiny. And that is very much the opposite of the kind of "equality" he says the Church promotes: the equality of slaves.

Gerard Stafleu