This paragraph, the first, stopped further reading. The Chinese historically had strong family bonds. Islam puts strict constraints on sex. Yet, Christianity with a tradition of marriage is the cause of western success? That's what the lead implies.
Both China and Islamic countries are stuck in a quagmire of brute rule all the while multipling like rabbits in marital bonds. So was Christian Europe until the Renaissance. I think western success has more to do with freedom and right to property. The Romans built an Empire that ascended when farmers could own land. It fell when the government began taking too much of their property. Christianity did not save Rome. It didn't save the commoner from servitude for the next 1000 years.
Pity you didn't read the rest of it.
What Judaism did was define some basic guidelines which were expanded and made more precise by Christianity. And Judaism and Christianity were what gave birth to the person, or at any rate, to the social concept of the individual person, which is what accounts for Western success.
The Romans and the Greeks, for all their splendid legal thought, did not extend individual "personhood" to all people of all classes. Property ownership is impossible for someone who is not a person, along with things like marriage, inheritance, etc.; and if a society simply does not consider all of its members to be persons, it is never going to be able to move into the economic world to which you attribute its success.
By defining a woman as a person, and a specific kind of person in relation to men, sexually and otherwise, Judaism set up a sexual dynamic that really did alter human society. Monogamy came more slowly, because while some of Jewish thought and self-understanding came through direct revelation, much of it came through the gradual revelation received through thousands of years of living the Commandments as a people. And this experience did lead to monogamy, although it was codified at a relatively late date.
Islamic society puts strange constraints on sex that essentially reflect what Prager mentioned: in traditional sexual morality, everything was divided on the basis of penetrator/penetrated. Islam permits polygamy, women are basically worthless, and homosexuality and bestiality are rampant. As in Roman and Greek society, the only person actually considered to be homosexual is an adult male who allows himself to be penetrated. Boys, on the other hand, are fair game, but when they grow up, are expected to be the aggressive parties, just like their fathers or uncles or whoever used them.
Ever wonder why Islamic societies fester and stagnate? About 100 years after they overrun other societies, those societies cease to be productive and creative - reflecting the rate at which sharia is extended. Look at the social structure brought about by their peculiar sexual attitudes and by polygamy, which also has the side-effect of causing a situation where there are not enough women to go around and creating large numbers of poorer men who will never marry. One of the best analyses I read attributed much of the undercurrent of anger and resentment in Muslim societies to the fact that many men will never be able to marry and have families, and hence will remain marginalized and rootless. In addition, the many children produced by polygamous marriages result in the excessive division of inheritances or in situations where only certain children inherit.
It took a long time for Christianity to bring this concept of the person to full fruition, although it is certainly part of early Church law. Women, for example, were to be able to freely consent to their marriages, were supposed to be old enough to do so, etc. - although naturally, the king who married off his unwilling 14 year old daughter as a peace offering to a rival king was a common feature of the Middle Ages. In later centuries, in countries that practiced slavery, slaves were supposed to be permitted to marry, inherit, and buy their freedom. Naturally, civil governments ignored many of these inconvenient provisions, and actual practice was uneven. The failure of the Church to get everybody to do what it ordered does not indicate failure, but simply reminds us of how slow the process was - just as it was with the gradual self-understanding of the Jews.
Furthermore, civilizing Europe was a very slow process; some areas were not even converted to Christianity until the 9th and 10th centuries. In other areas, barbarian incursions kept destroying the system brought by the Church. Spain, for example, was overrun by the Visigoths who brought their own brutal social system, which Arianism had never softened. Unfortunately, shortly after the conversion of the Visigoths to orthodox Christianity, Spain was overrun by the Muslims, who brought the repressive, anti-individual and anti-personal social system of Islam to Spain, where it was imposed in some areas for 800 years.
Your loss.