What IS good, and how do we determine it?

[Metis]

Randy, you keep forgetting there are places in this world where your pet religion never traveled until very recently. If it were "the TRAJECTORY of Christianity" then would you care to explain why the Japanese never had the trouble with it that the chister world had?

Simple. Not every group in every age has struggled with the same issues.

However, one cannot help but wonder at the barbaric Japanese treatment of the Chinese and the Allied prisoners of war during WWII.

Any worse than Charlemagne publicly torturing to death all of his subjects who refused to convert to Catholicism in 782 during the Massacre of Verden?

Sure the Japanese got to do it to more people, but I'm sure Charlemagne would have had a go if he'd had the same technology the Japanese had more than a thousand years later.