What Has Jerusalem To Do With Athens?

Ross Douthat: "But the whole point is that I don’t think that many humanists actually do have strong reasons for their hopes regarding human dignity and human rights. I think that they have prejudices and assumptions and biases, handed down as an inheritance from two millennia of Christian culture, which retain a certain amount of force even though given purely materialistic  premises about mankind and the universe they don’t actually make much sense at all. As to why they retain such force, I think Sanchez’s invocation of “awfulness” is actually spot-on: Liberal ideas about human rights and human dignity are still near-universal in the West today in large part because that same West spent the first half of the twentieth century experimenting with more genuinely post-Christian approaches to morality and politics and then recoiled in horror from the totalitarian and genocidal consequences."