What? I have never said this at all. Where have I said I have not looked into the origins of Christianity. I am not confused, most Christians are because they have never looked into the origins of their beliefs.
I have and concluded that there were many disagreements about doctrine and one side won out. There is no indication of god intervening to sort it out for them. My point is that not all early Christians believed the same things about doctrine.
If you're familiar with how orthodox beliefs came into existence and what they are, why are you claiming to not know what Christianity teaches? Obviously you don't have to believe any of it, but I don't know why you're saying you don't know what it even is.
You effectively tried to change the argument. Yes, politics were always part of the wars, but ignoring that religion was at the base of it all is inexcusable. And what "anti-religion polemics"? Just stating reality.
I don't believe religion
was at the base of a lot of what went on in the medieval period. If you look at the degree to which the papacy was a political power and the way the various monarchs vied for supremacy, I don't think it makes any sense to point to religion as being at the base of conflicts, and certainly not independently of the bigger political dimension to religious questions. Heck, King Francis I of France went so far as to ally himself to the Ottomans because of his conflict with the Holy Roman Emperor during the Reformation.
You're not stating reality by claiming that religion was at the base of everything. It was a factor, but not in any way the defining factor. It is inexcusable to ignore modern historical scholarship on this subject so that you can engage in anti-religious polemics.
Anyway, your original point was that "small differences" led to religious conflict, and therefore all the various Christian sects are irreconcilable, or something along those lines. The first part is self-evidently false, since whenever small differences led to religious conflict, there were
huge political interests involved also. And frankly, some of the disputes that seemed so important in the early church (e.g., Monophysitism) generally speaking don't make much sense to anyone anymore. It's silly to say because stuff like this happened, there are irreconcilable differences between all Christian sects. Worse than silly, it's condescending and oblivious, because you're telling people who actually
do discuss theology amongst themselves that they're incapable of doing that very thing.
) was how we could know what the Christian God was like, not whether or not the Christian God existed. That's a question about what Christianity teaches, so the obvious answer is that we can just look into Christian theology. It's not exactly internally inconsistent.
