There appears to be a co-mingling of agnostic or atheist belief and a general persecution of individual freedoms as a whole. My experience has been that the persecution comes primarily from a small subsets of misinformed Christian religious denominations that has taken hold in specific geographic locations. Regrettably the source documentation, normally the bible, has been retranslated so many times to reflect personal agenda that one must literally be fluent in ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek to understand what was said. One would then need a good background in its history to understand the nuances. Fortunately the Koran and Torah are both preserved in their original languages and I have not had any experience with other religious beliefs attempting to enforce themselves on the masses.