If violence is your only metric then I could see how you'd think we are better off over all. That's certainly valid. I am far less likely to have my life come to a short and brutal end thanks to war (or perhaps due to any other reason). And for me personally life is pretty peachy. So I may be better off but are we as a species better? Not so sure.

Unchecked power is bad, yeah I think that's a big key. Democracy is one way of keeping power in check. It's not perfect but as you say if we reverted to a monarchy things would get ugly.

And I agree with you re: Religious Democracies.

A couple of things I'd note:

If you want a less controversial example than Germany use Stalin's Russia. His regime was explicitly secular and violently oppressed religious people because of their religion (and just about everybody else for a host of other reasons too). He didn't like religion competing for loyalty with The State. China is a good example for some of the same reasons though I think their human rights abuses are exaggerated.

“I’d like to think that humanity in general and Christians in particular are better off than we were a hundred, two hundred, a thousand years ago. Frankly, we’re not.” I disagree.

Reading your response, I notice something in common with the theocracies of the past (and present for that matter – see Islamic nations) and the authoritarian secular regimes. The commonality is unchecked power. The reason we are better off today (in terms of the likelihood of having violence inflicted upon oneself) is because of the rise of democracy in the world. Democracy is designed to keep power in check.

This changes the question to, “In the absence of a democracies, would governments revert to committing violence against their own members?” I think almost all of us would answer that with a definite 'yes'.

Another question then comes to mind, “Is a religious democracy stable, or even possible for that matter?” I think it's possible – Turkey is the country that comes to mind as something close to this. But is it stable? In a democracy, the ultimate authority belongs to the people. In theistic religions, the ultimate authority belongs to a god or gods. What happens when the people want something that is in opposition to religious doctrine? Does the people's will become law or does the religious doctrine trump the will of the people? In the former case, it's not really a religious democracy, in the latter case it's not really a democracy at all.

Very thought invoking post!

Very thought invoking post!

However, not only could you take issue with some of the facts I cited because we don't have accurate measurements from 100 or more years ago, you could cite facts that would sound like things have gotten worse. This is not an argument I'm interested in the outcome of because I can't see the point. If things are worse, we need to make them better. If things are better, we still need to make them better. And the discussion about HOW we do that is going to focus on details of what to do and what not to do, not whether or not things have gotten better in general. We can learn from what we've done wrong, but again, that is a detail.

Possibly I got the exact words of the quote wrong, but the point stands. People will kill each other for all sorts of reasons. Any organized and powerful group is likely to at some point wind up justifying their own direct or indirect killing because groups are made up of people and people have that tendency.

That does not mean we aren't better off now. Not everyone and not everywhere, but certainly on the whole. As Einstein noted, though, we now have more capability to destroy each other. Whether it's the Bible or some other book or just some generic sense of right and wrong, anything that helps us as individuals contribute to avoiding that is a good thing.