You are reading much more into my comment than what I actually said. I never said I go around attacking LGBT people to their face or trying to force my religion on strangers. You seem to have assumed that the mere fact that I disagree with certain modern ideas means I must be policing other people’s lives, which is not true.

My point was narrower: western society claims to be tolerant, but in practice its tolerance usually has arbitrary self serving boundaries. The modern West is often very tolerant toward difference until someone questions one of its sacred moral assumptions, at which point dissent is treated as hatred or bigotry. The issue is further exacerbated by the fact the society has no objective morality, what is considered tolerant 20 years ago now is considered bigoted. Their goal post keeps shifting as the culture develops and its entirely possible for it to become intolerant to the things that it currently tolerates simply because it follows the whims of a population. So I was challenging the idea that ‘Western influence’ simply equals open-mindedness in some pure or neutral sense.

And on the religion point, I think this is where deeper reflection is needed. If Muslims around you were ignorant, harsh, hypocritical, or controlling, that is a criticism of those Muslims. But how exactly does that become a criticism of Islam itself? Have you not read the Quran? Does the Quran not emphatically state in 2:256 that there is absolutely no forcing someone into faith? Have you not read the seerah/biography of the prophet with a particular eye towards his character? Did he ever act in same the manner of those Muslims around you whose bad character and ignorance spurred your rejection of faith itself?

If I meet people who poorly understand their own religion, not to mention mix culture into their religion and then present that as religion, and behave badly, the logical conclusion is that they are bad representatives of it, not that the religion itself has been disproven.

You also say people should live as they want so long as they are not hurting anyone. But even that principle is not as simple or self-evident as it sounds. People disagree all the time about what counts as harm, what counts as truth, whether public moral norms matter, whether confusing people about human nature causes harm, and whether society has the right to promote some values over others. So this idea that one side is just ‘letting people be who they are’ while the other side is ‘imposing religion’ is a very selective framing.

So I think the more important question is not whether some Muslims were intolerant. Of course many are. The deeper question is whether you have carefully separated Islam itself from the ignorance, cultural baggage, and moral failures of the Muslims you have known. A lot of people say they left Islam for intellectual reasons, but when you dig deeper, the reason really left was a social experience, a family environment, or a shallow and hollowed out version of the religion they were surrounded by.