Attn: Christians, We've Heard Them Already

[Esquilax]

what can we really judge the ideology for, then? The people, or the concepts they selectively follow?

You are mistaken. Simple as that. You don't understand the ideology, because there is no conflicting information. You're judging a faith by a microcosm of that faith that you take out of context. Christianity addresses those points fully. Your understanding is muddied by them.

Ahh, the rallying cry of the fraud: "You disagree with me only because you don't know as much as me!"

Your ideology has precisely one source of information, a book- or series of writings, to be accurate- that you've taken to following. Those very same writings lay out in detail what slaves to buy, how much to pay for them, and just how much beating you can get in before it becomes uncool. And yet you don't follow that part of the book anymore. Those writings treat rape as mostly a breach of ettiquette unless the woman is married already. In any other case you just get a fine and a new wife, and yet you quite rightly treat it as a crime, in direct opposition to that ruling. Your bible has a hitlist of people you're allowed to kill, including nonbelievers and gays, but instead you settle for arguing with them.

And when this is pointed out to you, you fall back on good old special pleading. "You just don't get it as well as I do."

Don't get me wrong, I'm exceedingly happy that civilization has managed to drag your religion kicking and screaming into a gentler era, but that doesn't mean you get to forget your past, or reinterpret it so that all those good things that have been forced upon your side was somehow its idea all along.

The truth is, you can only claim your religion is a religion of peace by excluding large swathes of its ruling writings. And in lieu of an actual reason why that should be so, you instead resort to theological elitism, recourse to a special knowledge that most of us just call doublethink or cognitive dissonance.