That elite I described, however, is very likely to command the masses and convince them to follow them like sheep--especially when hanging the threat over them of dragging them out of their houses in the middle of the night for torture should they slip up.
Perhaps this PARTICULAR group or that one might get off easier, but others could just as easily be targeted, depending on what kind of regime is in power. Xenophobic regime? Foreign nationals would have to fear. Eugenics-obsessed regime? The disabled and those with any other characteristics considered undesirable would have to fear. Extremist capitalistic society? You sure wouldn't want to be out of a job there. And that's not even bringing up worship of the government seen in societies like North Korea or Communist regimes.
That minority that is capable of power grabs will indeed find a way to make it hell for the majority, with or without religion as an excuse.
That's nice, except, AGAIN that regimes aren't really the problem, or but a small one. The problem in our world, is that we don't just have a few regimes run by a minority that's bad to its own people, we're dealing with whole slews of people hating, hurting, killing, or wanting to kill, and blowing things and themselves up; because they think the Bearded Guy up in the sky told them to. No Bearded Guy, those people have no reason to do so.
Are you familiar with the Milgram and Stanford Experiments? If so, you can see just from that what a drastic effect even the most temporary human authority can have. The Milgram Experiment in particular is instructive to this case--notice how the man's simply being a doctor caused subjects to obey to the point of giving what would have been lethal shocks to the person on the other end...even when told that person had a heart condition.
Those people were NOT told to do so "because God wanted them to" or anything of that nature. They did it simply because a man in a white coat said so. If that's all it took to get these otherwise ordinary people to commit what would've been murder had someone actually been hooked up to those electrodes, then a government regime (and those who represent it) could
easily pull that off with nothing but earthly positional authority. The numbers as to how many refused Milgram's orders are quite dismal indeed.
I think perhaps many people find this quite disturbing to have to admit to. It's easy to have a scapegoat--to say that if religion were gone, all the ills of the world would be fixed. It's a lot more disturbing to face the truth about human nature and to realize that the problem is internal to each and every one of us, NOT imposed from the outside. Not to mention that accepting that the problem is internal places much more responsibility on us as individuals to face that aspect of ourselves and to take responsibility for our actions--whereas simply blaming one group for all the world's ills is a cop-out...it means the person in question need not consider their own contributions to the problem.
