I think it is important to consider the role that *collective* religious belief (in this instance fundamentalist Christian) may have in such cases.

While I would doubt that any but a psychopath or a Sadist would take their religious beliefs so far as to torture children to death on the basis of them, what such faith and religious dogma does DO do is legitimise and enable nutters and Sadists to do so.

Much similar could be said of Hopkins and his ilk during the European witchcraze, who *utilsed* religiously instilled fear of the supernatural in the common folk and religious doctrine ("thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" etc.) to freely perpetrate crimes of torture and murder of great numbers of innocent people.