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"Not one soul really believes that."

Aaaah... so now you claim omniscience do you? Not one soul? How do you possibly explain me then?

Now... it seems quite clear that you have abandoned the discussion and instead have chosen to make your last stand a milquetoast testimony of your respect for Christianity. If that is how you choose to leave the discussion, I am content to do so, since I have no interest in attacking anybody else's religious beliefs once they have ceased to offend. And I am comfortable that I have done a competent job of defending the fact that morality requires no imposition by a Cosmic disciplinarian.

But I feel obligated to hold your feet to the fire on one particular issue, and it has deeply troubled me for a couple days now. Several posts ago, you inexplicably defended the long and acknowledged history of Christian anti-Semitism as understandable payback for the Jews having killed Christ. Now, I do not believe you think it was deserved payback, and you certainly didn't say so. But you did seem to say that it was understandable, just one of those things that happens "when people get riled up."

Now... it was you and not me that volunteered the reputation of Jews as "Christ Killers." And yet you seem to deny that the Gospel of John could possibly have anything to do with that reputation. So, I still have to ask: If it did not come from the Gospels, where did it come from?

You wrote that, "My respect for Christianity is pretty profound, and I am very dedicated to understanding the entire NT correctly." Is it still not clear to you that it is precisely your "correct understanding of the NT" that led to the damning rhetorical stumble where you actually tried to justify the Holocaust as payback?

As uncomfortable as it must be to be that introspective, do you honestly not connect the dots between your "correct understanding" of the NT and your own justification of violence against the Jews?

...led to the damning rhetorical stumble where you actually tried to justify the Holocaust as payback?...

Now... it was you and not me that volunteered the reputation of Jews as "Christ Killers." And yet you seem to deny that the Gospel of John could possibly have anything to do with that reputation. So, I still have to ask: If it did not come from the Gospels, where did it come from?

Thank you for seeking clarification! I would hate to think anyone thought that I was in any way trying to justify the horrific evil that was the Holocaust.

I was accepting what I thought a false premise for the sake of argument (and let me make clear: ONLY for the sake of argument). Specifically I was entertaining your notion that Christianity led to the Holocaust as if it were plausibly true.

My point was that even on your view, the motivation for the Holocaust must have been along the lines of the normal natural human animal desire for vengeance. Essentially acting from a naturalistic moral code which had evolved into the human animal. In contrast to acting on the ethical teachings that Christianity accepts as revealed by God, which demands that we forgive others and love our neighbor and so forth.

Let me help your contention that the "revealed truth" Christianity is bad for a minute. You are better served by the Spanish Inquisition, which is far easier to tie to Christianity is it not? After all it was conducted under the political and religious authority of the most prominent recognized Christian church of the time.

Even so, your desire to blame "revealed truth" in regard to Christian ethics is still frustrated...because it is very clear that the last thing the evil men torturing the Jews wanted to do was actually follow Jesus. They just wanted to claim to be Christian because it was the popular thing to be at the time (not just a good way to avoid torture, but a good way to make an easy living et al).

Now certainly, I would expect some bogus rationalizations along the "Christ killers" line crossed the mind of some of the sick-puppies running the Spanish Inquisition. And if so, it is because they are choosing to ignore what they claim they hold as "revealed truth" in regard to ethics, in favor of their own ethic based on empathy, anger, their own reasoning and their own concept of justice.

Doing evil in the name of good requires buying into a lie which justifies good as evil. The Nazis bought into a such a lie, just as those who committed the atrocities of the Spanish Inquisition bought into such a lie.

Of coarse somebody can do evil, knowing it to be evil. But people so prefer to think they are doing good, they are quite industrious with coming up with rationalizations and other bogus arguments to support the evil that they want to do as being good. Sometimes the lies are supported by bogus religious revelation. Sometimes its just bogus arguments based on cold soulless reason.

Such lies are at root falsehoods in regard to ethics, not falsehoods in regard to fact (although false facts might be believed because of a bias connected with the ethical lie).

Essentially then, man fell from grace by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They invented their own definition of good and evil in place of God's.