But these were tyrannical dictatorships. When you want exclusive control the first two things you do is eliminate your competition and get followers by exploiting their fears. So their modus operandi was no different than the theocrats, they just didn't have a book of scripture to hide behind.
I'm not saying that if you ditch religion, everything will be coming up daisers (that's my new favorite expression). But imagine a democratic republic where instead of the leaders pandering to people with ultra fragile religious beliefs that fly in the face of the natural world, we legislate based on reason, sound science, and equality.
This thinking is part of the problem. It's wrong, it's defeatist, and when applied in the real world it usually becomes, "everyone who thinks, believes or behaves differently than me is more evil" and that's what fosters division.
We hear it all the time. Why worry about climate change and natural disasters when God controls the weather? If a hurricane kills a bunch of people they probably deserved it for their sinful lifestyles, right?
People are not innately evil, but they aren't innately good either. We have to recognize that each of us has the potential for both. Which way we go is based on the decisions we make. And we can make better decisions with a good education and understanding of the situation, not with an inflexible ideology.
The fact is that our only examples of fully secular states are not paragons of virtue. They tend to be totalitarian or utilitarian in the extreme. If we base it on our examples, we cannot say secularism would in any way be better than religious peoples.
Besides, even democracies when acting in secular interests have acted appallingly. For instance the Trail of Tears which expelled the largely converted five civilised tribes, the Tuskegee Syphilis trials, the Welsh hypertension trial, stopping treatment of radiation victims for data after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, British concentration camps in the Boer war etc.
As to man being evil - if you look at the historical track record of man, I do not see how any other conclusion could be made. Even secular naturalistic materialism with emphasis on selfish genes, with any altruistic tendencies being written off as secondary fitness, concurs on this point.
I don't think man cannot be good, but I do think that man tends to evil. If left to their own devices, evil would be far more prevalent, but culture, religion etc. intervene.
It is the lesson of Golding's Lord of the Flies, where the most regimented and upright group, the choirboys, degenerates to the most savage.
The problem with secularism is its flexibility on morals. That is how whole classes of citizens can become cockroaches or untermenschen or kulaks and be liquidated for the greater good, essentially as a moral act. Its how End justifies the Means can be used to defend abhorrent acts like experimenting on minorities and soldiers or how ideas like classless societies or in the name of income inequality, we can see the suppression of whole groups in formerly democratic states.
Besides, no Democracy will ever legislate on Reason, sound Science and Equality. Democracies are popularity contests and the average human is neither a scientist nor very reasonable. Most pandering for instance in the US today has nothing whatsoever to do with religious beliefs, but secular concerns. For if you value the opinion of the village idiot as the same as Aristotle's, then you would not necessarily always be heading in the right direction.
Perhaps a Platonic Philosopher-King would work better, but this of course has never existed and even Plato's attempts to create one were doomed to failure.
