I guess your point is still a little bit off to me... are you arguing that it is necessary for a society to have a Judeo-Christian belief system to sustain our western ideas of freedom and liberty? Or are you using universally transcendant rights as an argument for the existence of god and, probably more specifically, the Christian God?
My intent was more to disprove a secular, faith-less means of deriving transcendent, universal human rights (TUHR) than to prove anything.
As to your specific questions, certainly not the latter. As to the former, I believe that J-C belief was a necessary (but not sufficient) ingredient to get to our current conception of TUHR.
If you want me to make a point, my point is that there are no secular, empirical examples of TUHR. That what we think of as such derive from Western Civilization, of which Christianity has played a huge part. To be blunt, no non-western culture has come to value TUHR without either being conquered by some subset of W Civ or otherwise heavily influenced by W Civ.
I would assert that the combination of Christian emphasis on the inherent value of every being made in God's image, combined with Greek & Roman ideas of democratic and republican rule, leavened with a heavy dose of Anglo-Saxon personal sovereignty, and given time for those to steep and contend with one another...lead us to our contemporary belief that there is such a thing as TUHR.
I would further assert that TUHR are quite the exception in human history and geogrgaphy. I would argue that the idea of TUHR is a fragile one that plants the seeds of its own destruction, as our philosophers try to abstract TUHR from its messy, disorderly roots and repackage it as a secular philosophy cut off from the necessary underpinnings and beliefs...because it can not be adequately explained in secular, darwinian terms without some spark of faith in...something*.
I do not expect that TUHR will ever hold sway over the majority of the globe, due to the rest of the world's lack of our history. I also expect one day that the concept of TUHR will not hold sway in the West or the USA. The secularists will have prevailed, and traded our inheritance for a mess of pottage**. The only question is, "When?" Sooner? Later? Will there be a re-birth/renewal of faith and liberty before TUHR are snuffed out?
Nothing earthly lasts forever.
Contemporary secular types who try to reason their way to TUHR get tripped up by words that are burdened by western/christian morality. Right/wrong, good/bad. Just why is it wrong to murder? The samurai had no problem with murdering a common peasant and was not brought up on charges or even considered a bad person (unless it was not HIS peasant he murdered, in which case it was damage done to the property of a fellow samurai/daimyo). No universality there.
There may be survival advantages to be gleaned from treating others with a modicum of respect, but this darwinian calculus says nothing about the intrinsic value of other humans, because it is a calculation: do not rape the herbalist if you want to get that headache cure in the future.
We may even be hard-wired to work well with others, but hard-wiring to be social does not imply any value to others outside of the social group an individual claims as their own. It just means that the other person has value...as it pertains to service they can perform for self or group. For example, the aged widows of Arapaho warriors who fell in battle not only were not looked after when their husbands died, all the property formerly owned by the warrior was divvied up and hauled off by the other women of the tribe. The old widow was left to die of exposure, starvation, wandering predators, or whatever. The Arapaho didn't ascribe to old widows any value.
* Faith in something: God, Justice, capital "H" Humanity, Non-Aggression Principle. It just does not work unless you make value-laden judgements. Just why is it wrong for the strong to exact tribute from the weak, for instance? TUHR is a faith-based concept.
** It doesn't have to be a secular ascendancy. Undermining our faith in ourselves so as to allow some other culture unsympathetic to the concept of TUHR will do the trick, too.