My "obsession," to use your own insulting word, Markle, is something I've spoken of before, and has nothing to do with whether or not I feel sadness and sympathy for the victims, their friends and families, which of course I do, being just as deeply human (if not likely more so) than you. I expressed that in my post, but I also expressed, with tears, my enduring dismay at how so many believers love to say they've been "blessed" by their god, praising him/her/it for favors granted to them ranging from the big picture -- a wonderful, happy and healthy life, or, say,survival of cancer -- to things tiny and incidental -- the winning of a football game, for instance -- while something like this -- the horrific, suffering deaths of a group of young people -- is not allowed to be blamed on that same god for allowing it to happen, for various reasons ranging from the simple "It's His will, not for us to understand," to the more convoluted questions of free will and the existence of supernatural evil in the world, take your pick or pick another tenet.
I'm currently reading the story of Jaycee Dugard, the sweet, innocent 11-year-old child who, as many will recall, was abducted and held captive as a sex object for 18 years in a makeshift backyard structure by a horrid excuse for a man and his wife, and who, aside from being ripped from her family and held under terrible, humiliating conditions, and painfully raped day after day, had to bear two children by the criminal pedophile, the first at age 14. My whole point is this: when the faithful talk about being "blessed" with things great and small, my heart naturally turns with dismay to the terrible, abject suffering of others on this planet -- including the Jaycees of the world and the young people burned alive in Oakland -- and ever questions the existence, much less the granting of favors/blessings by, this supposed loving deity who's worshiped by so many (in so many different forms in umpteen thousand different religious types and sects), but who at the same time does not apparently "bless" the sufferers on this Earth as he does the winning football team. That dichotomy seems to somehow be acceptable. More power to you if you wish to accept that in order to believe in an afterlife. As for me, I can't.
Look, it's precisely because I feel compassion, sir, that I experience this great doubt, not to mention sadness. Seaoat has tried to say that my agnosticism provides me solace. Far from it. It's a state of eternal questioning that simply admits, and, eventually, accepts as probable, the inability of the human species to ever truly know - now, if ever - what it's all about. It doesn't rock me to sleep at night, but at least I feel I'm being honest, not fooling myself. Call that solace if you will.
So I express myself as I did in the face of great tragedy, just as you express yourself by the public offering up of prayers. I thought this forum was supposed to be about freedom of expression -- free speech, as you and your friends like to remind us.
Aside from the fact that the Pensacola Discussion forum is highly unlikely to be read by anyone directly touched by the Oakland tragedy, I'm not hurting anyone unless they allow themselves to be hurt by the honest, thoughtful questioning on the part of a fellow human being who is no longer "blessed" with the "gift" of knowing, or believing, or whatever one wishes to call faith, and who is deeply moved by the tragedy and suffering caused by this fire.
For this, you would condemn me. So be it, but by doing so you only show your own lack of compassion and breadth of understanding. Why does this not surprise me?