Persecuted Christians

[Esquilax]

To take your example of gay people beaten because the bible said to do so. Is that the prime reason? Or is it just because those people are violent and spiteful bigots who find, in religion, legitimation for their violence and bigotry.

They furnish only biblical justification for doing what they do? That's scarcely proof. It is the justification, but not therefore necessarily the reason. But it sounds better to them than "I'm a scared repressed bully trying to cope with feelings i don't understand"

I agree with you in part, in the sense that I'm dead sure there are people who are using the bible, or any other religious document, as justification for pre-existing bigotry. But at the same time, I'm not willing to reinterpret people's motivations beyond the ones they've stated, simply because... well, where would I stop? Besides, I'm fairly sure that if you took the number of violent acts for which religious justifications are used, and subtracted the number of times those justifications masked something deeper, you'd still end up with a positive number; after all, religious documents frame themselves as the words of the all knowing creator of reality and the source of moral goodness therein, it's not a huge stretch that the people who believe that to be literally true would also find their actions affected by those words.

Missives from the arbiter of the fate of your eternal soul aren't exactly something to sneeze at.