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Oh, come on. Don’t you know your Old Testament history? I’m talking about Joshua’s God-commanded conquest of the Holy Land and the holy orders to wipe out entire tribes to the smallest child or, in some cases, to spare the young virgin women for the men to rape and possess.

It’s all there in black and white.

I'm asking a more subtle question: where in Christianity were such episodes in the Bible used as a pretext for rape/murder/genocide in the Christian era?

Your claim was that the Church approved of and practiced those Old Testament actions that were commanded by God. I want you to back that statement up. Point me to an encyclical. A canon from an Ecumenical Council. A catechism. Something.

Tyke, you're talking about something that happened circa 1200 BC (Joshua's campaign in Canaan), and making that into some kind of a template of Judeo-Christian ethics. Such historic and theological unsophistication is simply breathtaking.

The Bible itself is rich with commentaries upon itself, later writings reflecting on earlier events. You must be aware of the very insistent, repeated teaching in the millennium of Hebrew writings after Joshua, that God abhors the shedding of innocent blood:

Deuteronomy 19:10
Do this [obey God's law] so that innocent blood will not be shed in your land, which the LORD your God is giving you as your inheritance, and so that you will not be guilty of bloodshed.

Deuteronomy 19:13
You must purge from Israel the guilt of shedding innocent blood, so that it may go well with you.

Proverbs 6:16-17
These things the Lord despises: ...haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood.

Jeremiah 19:4
For they have forsaken me and made this a place of foreign gods; they have burned incense in it to gods that neither they nor their ancestors nor the kings of Judah ever knew, and they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent.

Jeremiah 22:3
This is what the LORD says: Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hands of their oppressors those who have been robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place.

Joel 3:21
Shall I leave the shedding of innocent blood unpunished? No, I will not."

"Well, isn't this just a mass of contradictions?" you might ask. Here's what you need to understand: Biblical law is a gradual, incremental, and progressive revelation. You start with a barbaric people and say "Do not fight for slaves and plunder," (the situation in Joshua's time) and years later the Prophets reflect on this and say, "Do no wrong to the foreigner, the widow, the orphan, and do not shed innocent blood."

You start off with "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth" (a rebuke to the barbaric system of taking a life to avenge an injury, or killing a family to avenge a murder) and then you go on to "You have heard 'an eye for an eyenad a tooth for a tooth', but I say unto you, do not take revenge".

You start off with "If you divorce your wife, give her a written bill of divorce" (specific objective reasons) and you progress on to Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament: "The Lord says: I hate divorce.....You ask, Why? Because the LORD is the witness between you and the wife of your youth, and you have broken faith with her, though she is your partner, the wife of your marriage covenant" and you go on to Jesus saying, "Anyone who divorces his wife and married another, is committing adultery."

The point: the "no rewarding yourself for war by plunder and slave-capturing" law of 1200 BC was LONG expanded and superseded by laws upon laws forbidding massacre, protecting civilians and all the rest.

But I'm often intrigued that so many atheists also insist upon being fundamentalists. Like, "But this is what it says in the Book of Judges! This is it, fer cryin' out loud!"