You think Westboro wouldn't LOVE to throw some folk up on the rack if they could get away with it? The only reason there's been "progress" is because our society has steadily been willing to put up with less and less of religion's (specifically Christianity's) crap over the centuries. Take a look at fundamentalist Islamic countries, though. Shit still happens daily. I literally cannot ever go to Dubai because I would be at risk of arrest or worse for being openly gay.

Coming back to something mentioned earlier, does religion form the basis of ethics?

My first instinct would be to say "no, empathy does", but I say that after growing up with some religious framework imposed by the world around me, if not at home.

It's still a common belief that religion gets the credit for our morality.

The revolution in humanitarian rights (democracy, equality, welfare, abolition, education for all, etc) came out of the Enlightenment: mainly free-thinkers, deists, secularists, etc. Paine, Voltaire, Mill, Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Spinoza, Diderot, etc.

Of course, you can cherry-pick the Bible for the good-bits and ignore the bad bits, but in doing so you're already applying a pre-existing value system that does the filtering. It's reversing cause and effect. You could do the same filtering with a Tolkien book.

But bizarrely religion gets the credit, even though it's been the cause of holding back moral progress for many centuries (slavery, racism, monarchy, misogyny, homophobia, cruel punishments, etc). Studied closely, the Bible has an Iron Age moral code that has no place today. The fact that even religious people regularly dismiss large tracts of it is telling. And the further we progress (e.g. gay rights in the 21st century), the greater the parts of the Bible that have to be swept under the carpet as embarrassing to believers.