Deadliest religion ever?

[SteveII]

I agree with your point, but would add that to claim a religion is deadly, you would have to look at the religious teachings themselves to make a determination. Do the teachings promote violence? If not, the religion is not 'deadly' and any deaths that may have occurred in it's name should be laid at the feet of the people committing them.

There are surface readings which reinforce your point.  But religion isn't a surface phenomena, nor is it exclusively contained within the writings of the faith.  Messages about purity and defilement are interwoven throughout Christianity and support  things like xenophobia, us versus them mentality, and purification regimes.  The deeper, structural meaning of Christianity does indeed support violence, in spite of your attempt to misdirect by only focusing on "the teachings."  The violence of the first millennia didn't just spring unbidden from individual actors.  It had a source in the themes of the religion.  Horrors like the albigensian crusade spring whole cloth from the themes of Christianity.

I don't agree. Where could you possibly construe anything in the NT that would support any crusade of violence? Even if the whole organized church thought it was a good idea, that would not mean they got it from the NT. Even if their motives were as they said they were, at best it was classic ends-justifies-the-means fallacy--which is decidedly not NT.

In fact, there is no support for an organized church in the NT that would have the political power and the extra-biblical sway over the population that developed with the Catholic Church. That was a man-made creation and as such, man should shoulder the blame for its decisions.

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You are conflating Christianity with the OT theocracy. The two covenants are very different in their context, structure, and goals.

I'm not, but if jettisoning the foundation of your shared faith tradition is necessary in order to defend it against itself and comparison to islam.... I hardly see the point in bickering with you?

I don't think that recognizing very obvious changes in context, structure, and goals is jettisoning the earlier in favor of the latter. You can't ignore the differences and they need some sort of reconciliation and framework to understand them both (technically happening in what is formally known as systematic theology).