Do you think God is authoritarian?

[Thumpalumpacus]

Look at the metaphors they use: they are a herd of sheep to be led by the Shepherd. They are clay on the Potter's wheel. This rather speaks to their sense of being helpless nonagents, to be shaped by their lord. I bet they don't see God as authoritarian because they have voluntarily surrendered a good part of their agency.

That speaks to the pastoralist source, or, in the case of the nt, imitation of said source.  Sounds weird today, but these weren't bad things back then.  Sheep were wealth and warmth and food - they did not have the negative connotations we associate with them today.  In it's time, that sort of stuff was life affirming.  It comes out of the development of small hillholding families and communities.  The Shepherd was very often the pater familias (or his responsible sons) and the good shepherd is, essentially, the picture of a good family man.  Some of the best descriptions of the abrahamic god and gods relationship to man come out of these semantics.  If it were written here and today, god would be the good company man.  He'd be a union boss...or a randian hero.  

Perhaps. Just keep in mind that in that era, a "good father/family man" was a guy who fucked his wife whether or not she wanted it, beat his son for the most trivial of violations, and sold his daughter for a plot of land or an alliance to a richer family. So both our metaphors seem to map fairly well to authoritarian mindsets.

Leads me into a comment on some other things in thread.  The idea that the religious cannot think for themselves.  It's not that.  They can.  Even in the hypothetical of a family religion or ancestor worship it may be that the people do the thing but they do it because they also agree with the thing.

True -- and I didn't bring up the shepherd metaphor to imply that Christians are, in the modern sense, "sheeple". They're not, as I know from the believers in my family.