Here's what I absolutely cannot fathom. If Christians (or Jews, Muslims, or any other brand of monotheists) profess a central belief that there is only one almighty God, how do they manage to simultaneously hold a belief in lesser gods, spirits and supernatural forces? It would seem that one almighty God would subsume/supercede all that, wouldn't it?

And without a non-almighty God who doesn't control the supernatural world, how the fuck is witchcraft and sorcery supposed to even work?

Sure, this one guy was drug-addled, but what about all the rest of them?

Meanwhile, over in Syria and Iraq...

@1: Well, see, that's the thing. The Israelite God of the Old Testament is clearly a tribal god, one of multitudes in the area. He doesn't ever say "I am the only god," just "you shall have no other gods before me." It was only with the New Testament that the early Christians tied the Israelite tribal god to Plato's idea of an omnipotent, all-present being. The two don't really fit together at all.

@1,
All religions are rather baffling. Even their own damn followers have a hard time explaining how things work in whichever cult they're members of.

@1: In Judaic lore and mythology, there is only one God but there are plenty of spirits, ghosts, and demons out there, generally said to have been created on the dusk of the sixth day. Some are benevolent (such as Yossef Sheida), some are malevolent (such as Asmodei), most are complicated in their motivations.
Idolatry is sometimes identified with certain spirits, sometimes not.

@1 Traditionally Judaism was created from the view that only one god was worthy of worship. It's very clear in the Torah that other lesser gods existed, since Moses goes up against the Egyptian gods when talking to the Pharoah. The Egyptian priests perform an act of their god(s) and then Moses performs one from his to show that his god is stronger.

The Christian view is generally that witchcraft is gaining power from the adversary or other demonic/hellish powers. Witches were regularly assumed to have made a pact with Satan to gain their powers. Since Christianity does hold the view that there are two powerful forces who are at odds, it is very easy to hold the view that you can gain power from either of them. How you reconcile that with an omnipotent deity, I have no idea. But then, nobody can reconcile reality with a deity that is all three of omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. So, it's easy to let that slide.

I've also heard the view that what was meant by witchcraft was actually poisoning. That it'd be better understood as one shalt not suffer a poisoner to live. That seems a bit redundant with thou shalt not kill though. But depending on how poison was used, especially if you're talking poisoning a local water supply, then that would certainly be a really major and horrible crime.

I can't snark about this, it's just sad. The one kid's insanity was just aggravated by Christianity. The other kid was some goofy heavy metal kid who didn't realize how dangerous the other kid was until it was too late. I'm going to do my best to teach my kids some of the warning signs to look for in other people. One of them is devout religiosity.

And we kill each other because, "Our Christian God is better then your Christian God".

e.g. "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland on top of centuries of wars and pogroms in post-Reformation Europe.

@9, you thoughtful killjoy: True. We teach our liberal kids to be cautious around hot-button topics in our conservative, rural town, but I should revisit that with them.

That said, my 14-year-old writes some awesome FB posts along the lines of "this is what I think" and "this is what I've seen among my gay/atheist/etc friends" in response to various battshittery and it really tamps down the stupidity in a thread. That and sort of, "I've got a mind, a geology textbook, and snopes.com and I'm not afraid to use (quote) them".

I really wish more people would take passages of the Bible that teach extravagant love towards all people, even enemies, as seriously as they do these passages.

@10: No. The key difference between the Catholics and the Church of England (i.e. Anglicans, the largest Protestant denomination in the British Isles) was not theology or ritual: they mostly agreed on those things. It was "Who is rightful head of The Church?" Anglicans said the King of England was head of the Church while the Catholics said the Pope. Ireland had been conquered by henchmen of the King of England, so being Anglican/Protestant in Ireland was a VERY political statement that the King of England SHOULD rule over Ireland, and being Catholic was an equally political statement that his henchmen should go back to England and stay there. So Protestantism/Catholicism became an indication of a person's politics, in the same way that the colour of a football player's shirt indicates which team he or she is on. But opposing football teams are not opposed because they are wearing different colour shirts.

You Americans are so used to separation of Church and State that you forget what it's like when those aren't separated. But when a head of state (say, for example, the King/Queen of England) owns his or her own personal Church (e.g. the Church of England), wars and conflicts that are all about politics can easily get spun as being about religion.

Even the wars of the Reformation weren't entirely about religion. Otherwise, why was Catholic France allied with the German Protestants against the German Catholics?

@8: You can reconcile reality with an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent deity. An omnipotent deity implies that we might have an afterlife (since a deity who can't give us an afterlife isn't omnipotent), and if we have an afterlife then we can't draw a conclusion about whether said deity is omnibenevolent or not without a lot more information about said afterlife than we have. I don't think it's coincidental that every religion I know of that claims an omnipotent benevolent deity also claims that "good" people will get lots of awesome stuff after they die.

No one noticed the kids name? His first is already an evengelical prophet but Zoar is one of the "good" cities spared from the faith of Sodom en Gomora. I think we can safely assume that intense fundemtalist judgement passing has been heaped on the kid from the day of his birth.

I am with @9 on this. Very sad. My guess is this kid was in the throes of some kind of psychotic break (age of onset for schizophrenia and bipolar is late teens and early 20s), and his psychosis expressed itself with vocabulary from his religious upbringing. So without knowing more I would blame poor mental health care before I would blame religion. But I am only guessing.