Judaism isn't with freedom of belief as they claim

I appreciate my opponents arguments, but since he spent his second post mainly in response, I will also spend some time responding and, based off of changes to his argument, will also detail my argument as it stands now. Pro has made clear that his argument is not that Jews killed Jesus, and in this, I have apparently spoken in error. Instead, his argument appears to be, at least coming out of his first post, that Jews will kill Jesus and anyone else who claims to be the Messiah. The view is that Jews demanded his death previously (I'll get into that on my first point, and why it is incorrect), and that they will now physically participate in his death today (which will be in my second point). That, I hope, clears this portion of the argument up as to where I am going and where this debate is going. However, on the position of freedom of belief, I find that there is a contradiction here. On the one hand, in his first post, Pro has stated that "Judaism isn't with freedom of belief." In the second post, however, I see him saying "that reform Judaism is with freedom of belief." I no longer understand if this is a point of contention. Are we arguing that other sects of Judaism are not for freedom of belief? Or is this just stating that we are no longer concerned with whether they endorse freedom of belief or not? I will spend a little time on this argument, as I am unclear here, but I will focus the majority of my response on the other two points. 1. Jews demanded the death of Jesus First of all, I would like to note that the existence of this individual who was killed is in contention. We have no records purporting that such a person did exist aside from the New Testament, which was written several hundred years after his purported death. This is an argument of many biblical scholars today, such as Robert M. Price, who argues the following: There is no mention of a miracle-working Jesus in secular sources. The epistles, written earlier than the gospels, provide no evidence of a recent historical Jesus; all that can be taken from the epistles, he argues, is that a Jesus Christ, son of God, lived in a heavenly realm (much as other ancient gods, e.g. Horus), there died as a sacrifice for human sin, was raised by God and enthroned in heaven. The Jesus narrative is paralleled in Middle Eastern myths about dying and rising gods; Price names Baal, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, and Dumuzi/Tammuz as examples, all of which, he writes, survived into the Hellenistic and Roman periods and thereby influenced early Christianity. Price alleges that Christian apologists have tried to minimize these parallels. He argues that if critical methodology is applied with ruthless consistency, one is left in complete agnosticism regarding Jesus's historicity: "There might have been a historical Jesus, but unless someone discovers his diary or his skeleton, we'll never know."[1] But let's assume that Jesus did exist. That doesn't mean that the New Testament is written without error. For one thing, as Reza Aslan put it, "the method of execution settles the question once and for all. Crucifixion was a strictly Roman punishment for crimes against the state."[2] So it doesn't line up historically that Jews could influence this process. Not only that, but they had reasons to make the Jews look bad. This is the volatile aftermath of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans. They may well have been embroiled in religious disputes with other Jews who rejected their claims about Jesus. They my have been trying to avoid attracting attention from the Romans by writing inflammatory religious doctrine against them. They may have been trying to win Roman converts away from Judaism. They had reason to overstate, and make Jews look worse. Many notable Christian groups also disagree with this interpretation. In the wake of World War II, a number of Christian leaders and organizations issued formal statements on this topic. The Second Vatican Council issued the declaration of Nostra Aetate, which repudiated this belief of collective Jewish guilt for the Crucifixion.[3] The Church Council of Evangelical Lutheran Church in America adopted a resultion stating that "the New Testament " must not be used as justification for hostility towards present-day Jews," and that "blame for the death of Jesus should not be attributed to Judaism or the Jewish people." [4] In his 2011 book, Pope Benedict XVI repudiates blaming the Jewish people, even going so far as to question the historicity of the passage found only in the Gospel of Matthew which has the crowd saying, "Let his blood be upon us and upon our children." He does this by asking reasonable questions like, "how could the whole people have been present at that moment to clamor for Jesus's death?", which serves as just one of the claims in that gospel. [5][6] 2. Jews are not likely to kill any purported Messiahs, in the present or future. I will disprove this claim on multiple levels. It's not hard to find a list of messiah claimants (I know it's wikipedia, but most are well-cited): http://en.wikipedia.org... I'm just going to point out the number of people on here that are still alive (there are quite a few). I'd list them all, but they'd take up the rest of my space. There are 16 on that list, and that's just among the Christian claimants. The last one on that list was interviewed by Bill Maher for a movie, and many of the rest of these are very well known, often leading their own churches. And yet they're still alive, despite many of these claimants having lived for decades since making their claim. There's no reason to believe they will ever be killed by any Jew, or any person for that matter. But I don't have to go this far. Even in the one example you've provided, Jesus, Jews didn't do the killing, nor did they participate in the act in the slightest. The worst you could say (if you declare my entire first point wrong) is that they pushed for his death. Well, that's not going to make much difference in most countries today. Jews are a small minority in nearly every nation, vastly reducing their influence; judges tend not to decide who they're killing based on an opinion of any given group today; and the death penalty isn't even all that common, as many nations have banned it. If your view is that they're going to take the law into their own hands, then you need to provide an example of where Jews have done that. Is there a case of Jewish assassination of a messiah-type figure that I should know about? Lastly, we have more pressing issues to worry about today. As a small minority religion across most nations, we deal with oppression to a large measure ourselves. We've suffered massive killings ourselves in the Pogroms, Holocaust, and other various genocides, many of which were brought on by this notion that we had killed Jesus Christ. When you're the victim of these kinds of events, as we have been for millennia, you gain a strong appreciation for life. I would say that that appreciation by itself has changed attitudes in the Jewish community substantially. 3. Judaism is for freedom of belief I won't defend all of Judaism in this argument, but I will defend the notion that we are focused on freedom of belief for the majority of the religion, especially among modern forms like reform Judaism. Israel, the Jewish state, has laws proclaiming freedom of religion to be a paramount and valuable part of its culture. [7] We support separation of church and state, and our history with oppression has led us to be more accepting of other views. [8] Even interpretation of our own religion is left open, as texts such as the Talmud and Mishnah are written for rabbis to argue over what any given line means and how it should be incorporated into our lives. I'll leave it there. I await my opponent's response. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org... 2. http://www.thedailybeast.com... 3. http://www.vatican.va... 4. http://www.wcc-coe.org... 5. http://www.ignatius.com... 6. http://www.ctlibrary.com... 7. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org... 8. http://www.reformjudaism.org...