How much blame can we place on religion?

I’ve heard people claim “don’t blame the religion, blame the people who interpret the religion” or “blame the people whose use religion to justify their evil acts.” It seems most people don’t want the religion and its teachings to be blamed for hatred or evil acts, but rather the people who interpret their religion as supporting such things, even if it really doesn’t.

I recently watched a documentary called The World’s Worst Place to Be Gay about extreme homophobia in Uganda, where people are hounded out for being gay, shunned, disowned, beaten, killed for it.

Many people cite radical Christianity in Uganda as supporting such things and helping to fuel this attitude. But we can we blame the religion? Some will say the Bible is a book of love and forgiveness and it’s just “interpreted badly”. But it’s pretty fucking easy to interpret verses like Leviticus 20:13 “badly”: “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act; they shall surely be put to death. Their bloodguiltiness is upon them.”

You could claim that Leviticus doesn’t apply to the modern day or that it wasn’t referring to homosexuals as we understand them today, but what it says can be interpreted on the surface very easily to call for the death of homosexuals. Now can we actually blame the religion itself for this? I honestly feel like it is to blame. The Bible may preach love and forgiveness, but it also preaches this. And we can’t simply pretend it doesn’t exist.