richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

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twenty-first century are bunched together and way ahead of our
counterparts in the Middle Ages, or in the time of Abraham, or
even as recently as the 1920s. The whole wave keeps moving, and
even the vanguard of an earlier century (T. H. Huxley is the obvious
example) would find itself way behind the laggers of a later century.
Of course, the advance is not a smooth incline but a meandering
sawtooth. There are local and temporary setbacks such as the
United States is suffering from its government in the early 2000s.
But over the longer timescale, the progressive trend is unmistakeable
and it will continue.
What impels it in its consistent direction? We mustn't neglect the
driving role of individual leaders who, ahead of their time, stand up
and persuade the rest of us to move on with them. In America,
the ideals of racial equality were fostered by political leaders of the
calibre of Martin Luther King, and entertainers, sportsmen and
other public figures and role models such as Paul Robeson, Sidney
Poitier, Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson. The emancipations of
slaves and of women owed much to charismatic leaders. Some
of these leaders were religious; some were not. Some who were
religious did their good deeds because they were religious. In other
cases their religion was incidental. Although Martin Luther King
was a Christian, he derived his philosophy of non-violent civil
disobedience directly from Gandhi, who was not.
Then, too, there is improved education and, in particular, the
increased understanding that each of us shares a common humanity
with members of other races and with the other sex - both deeply
unbiblical ideas that come from biological science, especially
evolution. One reason black people and women and, in Nazi
Germany, Jews and gypsies have been treated badly is that they
were not perceived as fully human. The philosopher Peter Singer, in
Animal Liberation, is the most eloquent advocate of the view that
we should move to a post-speciesist condition in which humane
treatment is meted out to all species that have the brain power to
appreciate it. Perhaps this hints at the direction in which the moral
Zeitgeist might move in future centuries. It would be a natural
extrapolation of earlier reforms like the abolition of slavery and the
emancipation of women.
It is beyond my amateur psychology and sociology to go any