[a_Turk]

>> Christianity has many denominations with some real differences but I cannot begin to imagine such childish rivalry nor destructive skullduggery on an ongoing basis.

Uh, history is full of examples.. The Iron Curtain was mainly along religious lines. The breakup of Yugoslavia had Catholic-Orthodox strife with population exchanges/migrations. The Russian landing at the airport at Kosovo-Pristina, beating the US to it was along these same lines..

Granted, you don't have Jean Paul and Bartholomew literally at each other's throats today, but there was a time when the leaders of Christian denominations ruthlessly murdered each other in competition for each other's domain..

The Catholic-Orthodox rivalry was one of the major enablers of the Ottoman empire to expand westward, for example, along with the black plague which preceeded our waves of hordes.

[Mortimer Snavely]

"...there was a time when the leaders of Christian denominations ruthlessly murdered each other in competition for each other's domain.. "

At the end of it all religious hatreds had to give way to nationalism.

If you can get a copy of C.V. Wedgwood's The Thirty Years War, you'll find a most readable account of how this came about.

What's notable for the Turkish student of history and human behavior is that though there were a few Tamerlane types in central Europe during the 17th Century, unfortunately, there weren't any Nasreddin Hoca types.