richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

T H I: ' G O O D ' BO O K A N D T H E M O R A I, Z /• I f C I: 1 S T 265
that we have almost all moved on, and in a big way, since biblical
times. Slavery, which was taken for granted in the Bible and
throughout most of history, was abolished in civilized countries in
the nineteenth century. All civilized nations now accept what was
widely denied up to the 1920s, that a woman's vote, in an election
or on a jury, is the equal of a man's. In today's enlightened societies
(a category that manifestly does not include, for example, Saudi
Arabia), women are no longer regarded as property, as they clearly
were in biblical times. Any modern legal system would have
prosecuted Abraham for child abuse. And if he had actually carried
through his plan to sacrifice Isaac, we would have convicted him of
first-degree murder. Yet, according to the mores of his time, his
conduct was entirely admirable, obeying God's commandment.
Religious or not, we have all changed massively in our attitude to
what is right and what is wrong. What is the nature of this change,
and what drives it?
In any society there exists a somewhat mysterious consensus,
which changes over the decades, and for which it is not pretentious
to use the German loan-word Zeitgeist (spirit of the times). I said
that female suffrage was now universal in the world's democracies,
but this reform is in fact astonishingly recent. Here are some dates
at which women were granted the vote:
New Zealand
Australia
Finland
Norway
United States
Britain
France
Belgium
Switzerland
Kuwait
1893
1902
1906
1913
1920
1928
1945
1946
1971
2006
This spread of dates through the twentieth century is a gauge of
the shifting Zeitgeist. Another is our attitude to race. In the early
part of the twentieth century, almost everybody in Britain (and
many other countries too) would be judged racist by today's