Originally posted by Res Ipsa
hey I love guitar hero, so lets not use that as an example.

The way you just described yourself does not fit the "I just don't care" modus operandi. You sound like you might have cared too much in the past and are wondering why you don't care as much anymore.

This is a phase, and you will go through it more than once or twice.

I would consider myself a pretty compassionate person but hearing about 100,000 people dying in an earthquake or flood doesn't hit home. It is just a big number. Our troops dying in Iraq, it is just a number. What makes it hit home is when you hear the story of the individual. When you see a broken child laying dead in a street after a car bomb.

Your body, your brain, needs to protect you from feeling too much empathy at times. It needs to retreat and heal sometimes. There are plenty of people that seek professional help because they didn't cry at their father's funneral and they think there is something wrong. Some times our brain is just protecting us.

I didn't mean my flip thrown together list of crap to be a therapeutic remedy before.

I will give you a great example (for me at least) of this in real life.
I use to work at a Sexual psychopathic personality treatment center. These people have done unspeakable things but I spent hour after hour with them and talked to them. I knew what they were in there for obviously. BUT.....when you read their charts and their offence histories with the gory details...you either want to puke, cry, kill, or all three. But you suck it up, regroup, and go back and play cribbage with them. I have read over 100 such histories with many more I could have but I couldn't take it anymore. It didn't help me do my job any better, in fact it made it harder. I just needed to know if they had murdered their victims, the age of their victims, and if they were going to be a risk to my life and limb.

Now, for me, if there was no loving God then I would be screwed I think from the hope angle in life. Where I don't care is if people are happy without him than I have no desire at all to mess with their happiness. I threw the God and church thing in because it is just one grounding part of my life that has kept me healthy and sane. I am the antithesis of a Christian Fundamentalist...I fight them every chance I get. so believe me I wasn't preaching to you before.

Now, you didn't ask for some story, so sorry.

If you still care about the individual and their story, than you are healthy and normal. numbers are numbers no matter if it is 1000 or 4000.

I feel nothing when I hear that 4 Americans died in another road side bombing in Iraq. Until I see their mothers or their 10 year old child asking when mommy is coming home or when we hear about their lives and what they wanted to be. Then you can't help but want to grab Bush and Chenny by the ears and throw them into the middle of baghdad naked.