NCOT, that is your opinion. I, too, do not abscribe murfer and genocide to Christ's teaching.
The simple truth is that Organized Christianity (Catholic) did committ the atrocities of the Rhineland, the capture of Jerusalem, the Albigensian Crusade all while showering forgiveness on the murderers who did shout Jesus' name.
In the case of the Americas, the Conquistadors merely extended the religious intoilerance and bigotry that began in the Reconquista and Inquisition to the American Peoples (just do a wiki search). And the Protestants were worse, look at our Founding Father's First Thanksgiving Proclamation made by the Plymouth Colony (
The University of Oklahoma College of Law: A Chronology of US Historical Documents: The First Thanksgiving Proclamation).
And let us face it, the Spanish Catholics (in the end at least) were not as vicious and racist as we nothern Europeans. The majority in Latin America are mixed blood, so the Nations survive somewhat. North of the Rio Grande very little remains of the Nations. My English ancestors were just a little more efficent than my Spanish ones.
The evidence is not "flimsy". Just get Ward Churchill's "Struggle for the Land". Or it up on Google Scholar. There are thousands and thousands of serious articles on the persecution of the Native Peoples by "good Christians" obeying what they were told was the "Christian God" to murder and rape in the name of Jesus.
This should come as no shock to anyone who has ever seriously looked at the history of Christianity. I am not saying any Bible condones this, that Jesus wanted this, or that is not horrendous in the eyes of G!d. I am merely staing that Christianity has had many, many periods of erroneous interpretation (the Crusades, the Thirty Years War, slavery in the Americas, the Inquisition, the Reconquesta, the ownership of the Congo, the tacit help to Nazis....) .
They all come under the heading of "false and unjustified violence done in the name of Jesus". But they hapopened all the same.
