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Notes -
Christians and the Killing of abortion doctors:
I'm well aware that a strong case can be made for absolute Christian pacifism or more moderately for employing violence only with the consent of the ruling authority. Yet these positions are clearly not majority ones. Imagine if I posed to the average Christian the following hypothetical:
Tomorrow, the government passes a law declaring that blacks, being subhuman, are no longer entitled to any protection under the law. While the law allows you to kill a person who threatens the life of a regular person, killing a person who threatens a black is now murder. Mark 1.0 disagrees. While he is not black himself and has no special relationship with blacks, he consider them to be regular humans entitled to defense. As such, he goes to a black extermination center and kills a few of its exterminators. Are Mark 1.0's actions morally justified?
I think the vast majority of Christians would say that Mark was not only acting justifiably but commendably. If he started a revolution that overthrew the government, they would celebrate him as an example of Christian courage and dedication. If, however I replace Black with fetus, and exterminationist with abortion doctors, fundamentalists suddenly discover the value of 'giving unto Caesar', talk about how their belief in the sanctity of life is incoherent with killing abortion doctors and condemn Mark 2.0.
Once again, my claim is that there is no deontological theological justification that allows for Mark 1.0's actions, but not Mark 2.0's. Thus, when Christians claim to disown anti-abortion violence on religious grounds they are almost always either making a best methods utilitarian calculation (which given 60 Million abortions since Roe v. Wade seems rather specious) or demonstrating that their worship of the flag, trumps their commitment to God.
I feel like this topic, why don't Christians act more like utilitarians, seems to come up every couple months (usually in regards to abortion) and the fundamental mistake that guys like you always seem to make is trying to model Christians as utilitarians who are bad really bad at utilitarianism, or deontologists who are too stupid to grasp deontology, rather than as people sincerely trying to implement Christian principles.
Simply put, the moral valance of violence has absolutely positively fuck all to do with the "consent of the ruling authority" and I have no idea where you might have gotten that impression from unless you were falsely projecting own secular progressive background and moral intuitions on to others.
If you ask the average Christian for the fundamental principal underlying all questions of morality you're likely to get one of two answers A) Mark 12-30: Love God with all your heart and love your Neighbor as you would yourself. or B) the recurring theme from Deuteronomy, Jerimiah, Luke, Et Al of "Choose Life". The strict pacifists will cite A but there are many others who will point out that loving your neighbor doesn't preclude putting a bullet in their head. See Old Yeller. At the same time there are also a lot of Christians out there who subscribe to B and the Augustinian principle of "just war", the TLDR version of which being that the set of things worth killing for is a subset of the set things worth dying for.
I think you are giving too much credit to the content of their beliefs. History has shown that Christianity can be compatible with and used as justification for any number of completely contradictory actions. I think @4bpp has the right idea, the average person simply doesn't believe things with 100% confidence and logically follow them through to conclusions that are not openly endorsed by their social group and peers. They just sort of pick up their morality from social cues, while texts are used on an as-needed basis to post-hoc justify conclusions they had arrived at by other means in a sort of parallel construction.
Christianity is not [the set of beliefs held by people who call themselves Christians]. For any reasonable definition of Christianity you'll run into the issue that when people make certain decisions they are not being good Christians. Christians can justify anything; Christianity cannot.
There is no such thing as "Christianity", there is about 40,000 current Christian denominations and much more historical ones, every one claiming to be "one true church".
Anything you like, you can find church that praises it as the most Christian thing ever, anything you do not like, you can find church that damns it as the most unchristian thing ever.
What looks reasonable to you is not reasonable to another person and vice versa.
Was it reasonable thing to torture people to death to save their immortal souls?
Christians in third century would say no. Christians in thirteenth century would say yes.
Let me rephrase:
People are allowed to call themselves whatever they want. If your definition of Christianity is just [people who call themselves Christians] then you are by necessity making more of a point about general human nature than about Christianity, because of course there's at least one [person who calls himself a Christian] who believes literally anything.
If you instead narrow your definition to be more sensible, however you define Christianity, then your point starts to target the ideology rather than just normal human nature.
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