Thank you. I make that point constantly. Christianity is the philosophical foundation for ending slavery in most of the world. Muslims do not share this foundational idea. Their society is a massive pecking order where people are not equal, they are all ranked from lowest slave up to Allah.
"Equality" is anathema to Islam. It is not just wrong, it is against Allah.
Without Christianity, we would still have slavery.
Thank you. I make that point constantly. Christianity is the philosophical foundation for ending slavery in most of the world.
Actually, rationalism was the basis for the call for abolition. Rationalism was the idea that Nature obeys Nature's God, and that it follows rational laws laid out by the First Cause, the Creator, which men may improve themselves and their lives by learning, understanding, and employing to make life itself more orderly, more fruitful, better and more productive (as we were commanded to do by the parable about the servants and the talents).
Rationalism was the engine that detected the incompatibility of slavery with a just world and an orderly society (slaves had always been either wretches or "villains" [< L. villani, "farm slaves"]). Rationalism wasn't straight Christianity, and more latterly some people have sought to bring it into conflict with belief; but in the 19th century this wasn't so, and it was widely believed that even engineering was virtuous, and the profits of rational improvements, likewise virtuous. But here endeth the story for our purposes.
Lincoln said that he disliked slavery because it was inconsistent with the claims of the Declaration of Independence (hence, "Declarationists", who someday will come to grief at the hands of orthodox Communists) and of the American Republic.
But that wasn't why we had a civil war. That is a whole other story, as H.L. Mencken once pointed out, more than 100 years ago.