The great Western religions celebrate major holidays this time of year, and they are seen as either commercial or religious events. It is time to recognize the Judaeo-Christian ethic as a major philosophical turning point in human civilization.
In his book, “Inventing the Individual,” author Larry Siedentop describes how Christianity shaped the western world’s emphasis on the value of the individual. The Judaeo-Christian ethic profoundly influences the west’s belief that each human being has rights not as part of a group, but as an independent person. This, of course, is anathema to those who adhere to the collectivist mentality which dominates Marxist and socialist philosophies.
Zenit, a Catholic religious publication, reports that Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, the Vatican’s secretary for Relations with States told delegates attending a conference on Christianity and freedom that the concept of human rights has its original roots in Christianity. He stressed that “the concept of human rights itself originated in a Christian context’ and offered as an example St. Thomas More. The 16th century martyr, at the price of his own life, ‘bore witness to the fact that Christians, in the light of reason and by virtue of their freedom of conscience, are called to reject every form of oppression’ he said. ‘The link between Christianity and freedom is thus original and profound,’ he continued. ‘It has its roots in the teaching of Christ himself and Saint Paul appears as one of its most strenuous and brilliant defenders. Freedom is intrinsic to Christianity, for it was, as Paul says, for freedom that Christ set us free’,he said, adding that while Paul referred to interior freedom, this ‘naturally also has consequences for society.”
Dr. Max Stackhouse, speaking at a Pew Research forum in 2003, outlined his views on the relationship of the Judaeo-Christian ethic with human rights:
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“Christians and many Jews [adhere] to the … because we believe that each person is made in the ‘image of God.’ That is, we have some residual capacity to reason, to will, and to love that is given to us as an endowment that we did not achieve by our own efforts.
“…the dignity conferred on us … demands both a personal regard for each person, and a constant drive to form and sustain those socio-political arrangements that protect the relative capacities to reason, to chose, to love that are given with this gift. Moreover, Christians hold that each person is called into particular networks of relationships in which they may exercise these capacities and to order these networks with justice, as God guides us to be just and loving agents in the world. We believe that in Christ, we learn how God wants us to re-order the institutions of the common life – sacramentally, or as others say, covenantally – that are necessary to preserve humanity, and how to make them and ourselves more nearly approximate to the redemptive purposes God has for the world. Those Christians who know the history of the development of the social and ethical implications of their faith, believe that the historical and normative defense of human rights derives from precisely these roots and that this particular tradition has, in principle, in spite of many betrayals of it by Christians, disclosed to humanity something universally valid with regard to human nature and the necessities of just social existence.”
Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah from the New York Analysis of Policy and Government