Did you mean to say "philosopher" or are you saying there can be no morality without religion?

Regarding the latest part:
It looks like when you say "strong" states you mean "resistant to corruption", and everyone else is assuming you mean "more redistributive". In that sense, I can't see why you'd use the Soviet Union as an example of a "strong" state. It was big, but also very corrupt (even early on) and relied on brutal methods of oppression. Since we're talking political science, do you use some metric for measuring "strength" of a state quantitatively, or a ranked list or something? Basically I want to check that state strength (however defined) correlates with more/fewer human rights violations.