Taukinukufili Taufa is a New Zealander who ran the Church of Baptism with Fire & Holy Spirit, and he believes that God speaks to him directly and he believes in baptism through “heavenly fire”.

His house caught fire.

The fire killed his wife, his daughter, three grandchildren, and six other people that were staying with him. This isn’t ironic, it’s a great screaming tragedy in these people’s lives; if it had happened to me, I’d be devastated. To lose 11 friends and family members in a great conflagration in one’s own home…I’d be a wreck, struggling to understand what went wrong, worrying over guilt and loss.

Not Mr Taufa! He’s got his religion to console him.

God showed me how to do it, baptise people in the fire of the Holy Spirit. This is not bad after all, it’s a blessing in disguise.

Why is it a blessing? Because now more people will hear about his church.

I know it’s going to be a tourist resort in the future because people in the world heard about it. They will try to come and have a look

The other six people who died in the fire were the wife and five children of Jeremy Lale, who’d been staying at the house. Taufa says they “came here at the right time”.

They [were] included in the people that God chose to become his people in heaven.

There is a fine line between being optimistic and trying to look on the bright side of life, and being an unfeeling psychopath and demented fuckwit. With the aid of his faith, Taufa has skipped across that line and is racing away from his humanity as quickly as his feeble excuses can take him.

The police seem nonchalant and think the fire was only an accident. Maybe they should look a little more closely at the fellow who is bragging about his motive and shows a remarkable absence of grief for someone who just had 11 people die under his roof.