"Your western morality is based on Judeo-Christian values"

If I got a penny each time I was told by the religious, or that strange breed of atheists fans of Jordan Peterson, this most unnerving, cringy assertion, (rarely, if ever, followed by any justification) I would buy myself a yatch. It's especially appealing because it hides a few lies amid half-truths.

Human civilisation is WAY older than Judeo-Christian "values" (If they aren't those a mixed bag of contradictions in the first place). But to claim that Christianity was the origin of Western Civilisation is a bit of a perverse argument. Christianity was the dominant religion in Europe for centuries, and it was so by the sword. Of course, only the Christian long-lasting hegemony could relay us all that it was inherited or usurped to older civilisations, not to mention the cases when it acted as a censor of ancient wisdom.

The claim of ownership or copyright on human morality is both a veiled assertion on the existence of a supernatural being (without even mentioning said being), but is often made by people accepting the evolutionary origin of religion; which should fly in the face on the supernatural origin hypothesis. It's also a more direct claim that without Judeo-Christian morality, we would be killing each other like savages, and so we should see such evidence in anthropological research of antiquity. And yet, what we see is perfectly stable civilisations prior to Judaic Monotheism, with their own codes of law, with their reasonably thoughtful moral norms, and we see those being inherited by Judaism. Not to mention the Chinese, or the Japanese, or the Aztecs and the Mayans, who didn't have any contact with Christianity until much later, (if they weren't colonised and slaved by Christians, in the case of the American natives). If there was any savagery or injustice in pre-monotheistic societies, the same can be found in monotheistic ones.

Perhaps the one concept that has something like an authorship claim in Judeo-Christian values is that of Social Equality. Although the Hebrew did not undertake the study of Equality as a social value per se, Judaic Law effectively applied to all people regardless of gender, sex or position, stablishing a direct relationship between all the Hebrew people and their God (see Ezra-Nehemiah). But, that would leave out other places where this idea evolved independently. One could be the Buddhist rejection of the Hindu Caste system. But a more direct ancestor of our current understanding of Equality is of course in polytheistic Ancient Greece. It was in Aristotle's discussion of political justice that he examines equality in a way that resembles its modern understanding. Political justice is a matter for citizens, whom he defines as "those who share in common a life aiming at self-sufficiency, who are free and either proportionally or numerically equal" (Ethics, 1134a27–29).

Although the status of Athenian citizenship does not extend to slaves, one has only to imagine the abolition of slavery to achieve real Equality under the law... and it's not like Judeo-Christian values perform any better on that front.

As George Carlin once said about the Ten Commandments, "God forgot a couple of things, like... Slavery! It just fucking slipped his mind."