"The level of hatred, unfounded fear and misinformed people was astoundingly sad."

[backscatter712]

30. This is why I have such a big problem with religion.

Religion is the perfect medium for moral inversion.

Take a morally reprehensible category of acts: bigotry, discrimination, abuse and violence against the LBGT community or some other out-group.

Any normal, clear-headed person would be able to figure out that such acts are not cool.

But shrink-wrap these acts and put a sticker of Sweet Baby Jesus on them, complete with a few quotes out of the Bronze Age Book of Fairy Tales, and suddenly, the evil act becomes righteous in the eyes of the true-believers. People commit acts of horrendous evil while thinking they're good.

Voila. Moral inversion.

It's no coincidence that religion is implicated in so many of the truly monstrous acts in human history: the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, the Holocaust, the wiping-out of Native-Americans, etc. etc. etc. So often, these acts of wanton evil and destruction were justified by the magic words "They're not Christian (or whatever is the in-group religion)."