I had a roommate once who was in the same church I was in, but who saw Satan's hand of persecution everywhere.
If he had a flat tire, it was religious persecution because of Satan.
If he went to buy a pair of shoes and the store didn't have the shoes he wanted in his size, it was the hand of the devil trying him and testing his faith.
The guy at the deli got his order wrong? It was religious persecution because of Satan. And if it wasn't just "he put mayo on my sandwich" wrong but "he put bacon on my sandwich wrong", look out. The church was Torah-observant. Bacon = pig = bad.
The Illuminati, directed by Lucifer himself, was responsible for bacon bits in his salad. (Yes, God does hate shrimp for food, he'd have said. Got evidence of Jesus at a crawfish boil? And those swine that went into the lake weren't exactly fished out by the disciples at his behest for the masses to eat. 'Nuff said.)
Somebody honked flipped him the bird when he did some dumb-ass move while driving. Obviously religious persecution because of Satan.
We won't even discuss the time his car engine caught fire.
Try to tell him that that crap happens to everybody, and he'd frown. It was religious persecution because of Satan. Counter-examples weren't really counter-examples because, well, *prove* it wasn't Satan. His response was that it was Satan's world, so anything that could be construed as religious persecution was religious persecution until proven otherwise beyond any doubt. There was no human agency or assholery allowed without it being personally directed against him by the Dark Lord himself, whether the idiot that backed into his car or the fact that he went fishing and didn't catch any trout. That's how fundie true-believers work. A fact is either confirmation or irrelevant. (I personally found it self-aggrandizing, thinking that he mattered that much.) And given confirmation bias, confirmation's everywhere.
Then he tried dating this one woman and on the first date he told her how she was wrong and needed to see the truth--only to have her call him a crazy person, tell him off, and leave before the main course was even served. It was religious persecution because of Satan, of course. I told him that he was an ass and if she'd been less kind and forgiving she'd have waited a little while then he'd have been wearing his pasta and farting through his cannoli. Again he frowned. It was religious persecution because of Satan. Had to be. He never did anything wrong. When the guy who arranged the date for him put things in a much harsher way, he frowned even more. How deluded could we be not to see the obvious hand of Satan trying to personally make sure he never married, instead blaming him, the innocent victim? (To everyone's great surprise, he finally did get married. If there's ever a saint, it's his wife.)
Now, don't get me wrong. There were people who honestly did treat him badly from time to time because of his religion, and not just because he was generally an ass (can't rule that out as a contributing factor, of course). Somebody would ask why he was taking a day off, he'd say why, and they'd call him a "fucking Jew" or, worse, back away and ask if he was Mormon or a JW. Some would insult him because they assumed he'd voted for Reagan (or Mondale) based on his religion, whether it was the "don't justify certain behaviors" aspect or the "help the poor" aspect. That was low-grade religious bigotry, because his beliefs really had no effect whatsoever on those who were abusive or insulting and generally didn't result in his being put in a death camp. A somewhat higher-grade religious bigotry was when the person involved would tell him to just get out and cancel a sale, or call to ask for a different salesman. Then he lost income because of religious bigotry. Still, no burning at the stack as a heretic or having acid thrown in his face.
The point is that the default setting is that assholery is just assholery, not religious persecution. The default setting is "presumption of innocence," not "everybody's guilty until they prove to me otherwise, and I'm a hanging judge." Of course, he only knew what happened to him, not how his personal foe du jour treated other people. He wasn't omniscient, and even when he was insulted and the insulter's wife would say her husband treated everybody badly, he's still assume that his treatment was both intentional and probative of Satanic intent. He was deeply committed to the fundamental attribution fallacy and the general generalizability of non-random samples. Belief trumps logic.
However, every time there was something that could honestly be called religious bigotry, the only thing he saw was validation and confirmation that all those other instances he called "religious persecution" were, in fact, real religious persecution. In fact, he didn't even need to see it inflicted on him. Just hearing that somebody else was insulted over religion confirmed it. Even if the full story showed that the insult wasn't over religion but somebody else's incompetence as a decent human being.
What was odd was his insistence that he was actually very tolerant and non-judgmental. Like I said, he was generally an ass. But he paid half the rent. Oh, and he didn't throw parties. Generally making oneself into a leper precludes parties.
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