In a wide-ranging reflection on the good that religion—and in particular, Christianity and the Judaism from which it stems—has done for the West, Jonah Goldberg writes:

Even the supposedly religion-free zones of modern life—science, law, Harvard faculty meetings, etc.—would not exist but for the Judeo-Christian foundation they stand upon. If a religion-free society is a garden, you can pluck virtually any flower from the soil and find long religious roots dangling below. (Indeed, to strain the metaphor further, some of the plants in the garden are more like potatoes or turnips than flowers in that they’re nearly all religious root, with the bits breathing secular air little more than a hint of what lurks below.) Human rights, universal equality, the sovereignty of the individual, higher education, and scientific inquiry—even the idea of secularism itself—are products or byproducts of Jewish and Christian thought.

I suppose it’s possible that there could have been an alternative timeline where we got driverless cars and microwave ovens, democracy and the Bill of Rights, without Abraham and his theological progeny. But the indisputable fact is that we didn’t.

You don’t have to believe that your rights are God-given, but the belief that your rights are a gift from God is why we eventually got rights.

As an aside, Goldberg—not unfairly—credits the apostle Paul with the idea of human equality. But it’s worth noting Joshua Berman’s argument that this is an idea that unmistakably originated with the Hebrew Bible.

Yesterday, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Israeli representatives have been involved in secret talks, brokered by the United Arab Emirates, with their Syrian counterparts about the potential establishment of diplomatic relations between their countries. Even more surprisingly, on Wednesday an Israeli reporter spoke with a senior official from Syria’s information ministry, Ali al-Rifai. The prospect of a member of the Syrian government, or even a private citizen, giving an on-the-record interview to an Israeli journalist was simply unthinkable under the old regime. What’s more, his message was that Damascus seeks peace with other countries in the region, Israel included.

These developments alone should make Israelis sanguine about Donald Trump’s overtures to Syria’s new rulers. Yet the interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s jihadist resumé, his connections with Turkey and Qatar, and brutal attacks on minorities by forces aligned with, or part of, his regime remain reasons for skepticism. While recognizing these concerns, Noah Rothman nonetheless makes the case for optimism:

The old Syrian regime was an incubator and exporter of terrorism, as well as an Iranian vassal state. The Assad regime trained, funded, and introduced terrorists into Iraq intent on killing American soldiers. It hosted Iranian terrorist proxies as well as the Russian military and its mercenary cutouts. It was contemptuous of U.S.-backed proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, necessitating American military intervention—an unavoidable outcome, clearly, given Barack Obama’s desperate efforts to avoid it. It incubated Islamic State as a counterweight against the Western-oriented rebel groups vying to tear that regime down, going so far as to purchase its own oil from the nascent Islamist group.

The Assad regime was an enemy of the United States. The Sharaa regime could yet be a friend to America. . . . Insofar as geopolitics is a zero-sum game, taking Syria off the board for Russia and Iran and adding it to the collection of Western assets would be a triumph. At the very least, it’s worth a shot. Trump deserves credit for taking it.