This is a reasonable first-blush guess, but the reality shows different. And a little reflection reveals why: because authoritarianism is based on the State being the ultimate authority. But for a religious person, God is the ultimate authority.
This is why churches have been places of refuge countless times throughout history. It's why t he organization most consistently undermining the GDR was the German clergy.
For a religious person, men claiming to speak for God are their ultimate authority.
This makes churches essentially the 'government' - one form of govt is simply exchanged for another.
Any group of people that truly believes "Love God and love your neighbor as yourself" can only be enslaved for so long.
Romans 13:1 - "Obey the government, for God is the one who put it there. All governments have been placed in power by God."
Religion can be used to enslave, to be sure, but it is also the ultimate bulwark against that enslavement persisting.
It's really not. Unification is the bulwark, religious or not; it allows people to accomplish things in groups that they can't do alone. Resistance to slavery is simply genetic which no one has to be 'taught' - people only accept it if conditioned to out of fear.
Religion if anything just encourages people to submit to it if the enslaver claims, and is blindly accepted to be doing it on behalf of God.
No there isn't, because the correlation between atheistic societies and totalitarianism is 100%.
That also happens to be the same percentage that describes how many liberal, western societies were formed by and for largely religious people.
They were also formed largely for and by white people, while we've yet to see a liberal, westernized society in Africa - therefore whites must be racially superior to blacks. Right? The correlation is just as you described.
Aye, and from the phrase "God-appointed monarchs," they excised the "-appointed monarchs" part. They kept the "God."
Meanwhile, the French had their own revolution based on the same general values, but without the God part, and it was a disaster.
Not because they lacked the "God part", as much as it was a greater reaction to a greater degree of oppression than what the colonists faced.
On the whole it definitely wasn't a disaster, it just could've been better - in the long run it was a huge improvement over what they had before.
History never gives us perfectly isolated experiments the way the hard sciences do, but that's basically as close as you'll ever get.
And why have all the anti-religious societies have been Communist ones? Because all societies will worship something. When you rule out God, making the State your new God is the most logical alternative. Secular societies are particularly vulnerable to Statism.
By the same token, a religious person who believes that God commands him to kill infidels is more likely to resist Western democratic values than a non-religious person. So in that scenario, the religious person is more vulnerable to theocratic statism.
So you're failing to prove anything. You're just suggesting that one form of statism is preferred to another. Decrying authoritarianism and statism on one hand while at the same time claiming that people should blindly accept that a set of values invented by man "comes from God" - without question.
And you do, of course! So much so that you have the authority to say that people didn't do things for the reasons they said they did, even as they risked their lives to do them.
They weren't aware of the underlying reason, everything that people do has a biological route and explanation. The most basic biological reasons are pretty "simple" and "universal".
By your standard then, a drug addict is a "better authority" on what causes drug addiction than a person who's devoted their life to studying drug addiction and working with addicts. Sorry but that's just denialism.
I think I'll let that argument just speak for itself.
Reality speaks for itself. Everything I'm saying is establish scientific fact - you may not 'like it' but that doesn't change it.
The average joe couldn't even define social mirroring, or explain the basic biological functions of human body language - let alone understand how it works on anything but an intuitive level. This is why they falsely believed that 'religion' was the reason - because they were trying to provide an intellectual explanation for something they'd never studied in detail, but rather just learned intuitively.
Right, how could I forget the famous landmark study that analyzed the body language of 19th century abolitionists?
Body language has been found to be pretty much universal in the human species (as it is in other species) - even cultures completely isolated from other civilizations have pretty much identical means of communication.
In your example democracies hadn't even been tried.
Actually democratic forms of govt had arguably been tried in ancient Greece, and arguably "failed" (democratic Athens was conquered by authoritarian Sparta, for example).
The Roman Republic eventually failed and became the Roman Empire (which in turn failed as well, and lead to Europe succumbing to authoritarian monarchies).