"of how the Catholic world went from Jesus’ principle of "Love thy neighbor" and "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" to a full blown religious wars and the Inquisition"

One of my favourite debates, but probably not the right place and time for it, to discuss it fully.

But maybe a little bit:

1.Jesus said some other things as well, besides loving everyone, like he is there to bring the sword and he is not there to abolish the law(old testament) but to fullfill it. So of course there is lots of room for interpretation, but nevertheless, this allowed for all the archaic and brutal parts of the law, the old testament, to be included.

2.catholicism became state religion in a empire on the decline, close to collapse.

"but all the foot soldiers have is the cognitive dissonance between their orders and their dogma"

And the foot soldiers of empires, almost always had as the highest dogma - to follow their orders, not to morally judge them. And since the catholic dogma has a lot of battle descriptions included - even the thinking soldiers can find justification, without great cognitive dissonance. But sure, the christian military priests in nazi germany on the frontlines and such, probably had to have a bigger cognitive dissonance from their holy book and their actions.

You have to remember that christianity back then was a state religion which was intended to support state order. Nobody was intended to understand christianity.

When Constantine made christianity the religion of Rome he discovered that christianity was not well defined. Constantine created the Council of Nicaea to clean up the religion. It was a capitol offense to even believe some of the previous christian beliefs if the Nicaean council deleted your belief. Many many christians were executed.

Constantine then decided to make many Roman regions christian in name only. This included incorporating pagan gods as christian saints and adopting pagan festivals and other practices. Only a tiny educated class was expected to understand christianity at all. The uneducated class was not well regarded so that was OK.

The inquisition came much later. The intent of the Inquisition was to expunge the pagan adoption that started under Constantine. Most of the people executed during the inquisition were affiliated with pagan practices. Many of the women were pagan priestesses. At that time you had to read Latin to even understand the bible so I am sure the inquisition was confusing for most people.

Christianity absolutely has core doctrines that existed before the nicenene council- you're advancing a fiction. This idea of Christianity as a state religion is not historical and has no foundation.

Most of the major Pauline Epistles are mid first century, there were theological controversies as Christianity expanded but it's for sure not a state religion. It took centuries for the faith to dominate the pagan empire and the two got along pretty well well into late antiquity. Ultimately, many of the debates within Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries are so obscure we can hardly understand them from a modern perspective- like the miaphysite controversy and countless others.

If you remove the epistles, the old testament, and the apocrypha (meaning of questionable origin) you are left with 4 gospels of which 3 are nearly identical. This is what we have left of the teachings of Jesus. Many known gospels were removed during the Council of Nicaea. For instance, the Gospel of Thomas was removed because it was in conflict with the Gospel of John.

The other controversial issue from the council of Nicaea was the nature of the trinity. Many a holy war was fought over this exact issue for hundreds of years.

I understand what you are saying about Paul - but his assignment was to define a jewish sect for gentiles. That is what the epistles were. Paul redefined our modern understanding of Christianity by aligning the gospels with the intellectual class of the Roman empire.

I don't know if the complex fulfillment of messianic expectation can be reduced to 'love thy neighbor' or if that principle really can be stretched as far as you'd like it to go.

As far as the Inquisition, the historical reality falls far short of the Monty python esque black legend our culture has inherited from protestant Europe. Really, trying to portray the Inquisition that way has more to do with historical anti catholic bias than facts and figures. These sorts of analyses always tend to ignore inter-protestant sectarian violence or any of the killings of catholics by protestants , usually out of ignorance but often due to selective framing for ideological purpose.

It's sad to see when individuals' view of history is reduced to snippets of propaganda. Educate yourself on the both sides of the story, or suffer the risk of having your thoughts be manifestations of someone else's consciousness.

Well, I mean, how many people in the 16th century had a good strong comprehension of the differences between Trans- and Con-substantiation. Like, the final reason the Protestants were unable to reconcile with the Catholics comes down to a linguistics and translation argument that's right out of Bill Clinton's impeachment.

I sincerely doubt the peasants filling out, say, Zwingli's army for instance had any real informed opinion on the liturgical dispute.