Persecuted Christians

[Jacob(smooth)]

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;

Point. Couldn't be a negative. Having said that in the interests of balance, one must also take into account the people who DON'T do violence on account of religion. Both sides of of the equation need to be considered.

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.

You'd think! And yet people do don't they. To take Christianity as an example (simply because its the text I know more about) someone who beats a gay person to death with a pipe on account of deuteronomy must also ignore all the stuff about not judging others, turning the other cheek, loving their neighbor etc. And there's a lot, lot more of that.

One of the recurring and I think justified critiques of the bible is that one can find justification within it for almost ANY position. There are contradictions throughout. As such any action of violence is condemned by the bible as well as condoned by it. So regardless, anyone committing an act of violence in the name of the bible IS thumbing his nose at the missive of the arbiter of the fate of your soul.

As I've opined before, the bible is a rorscharch.