Sounds like a cut scene from The Exorcist.
They drank all the god swill.
I might not state this in a more pious thread, but here I feel free to disagree that encouraging magical thinking in other people is morally neutral.
My first thought is that I don’t see how laughing at this is consistent with thinking a televised execution is horrible.
There’s a reason why the funny vids have to include the disclaimers about harm.
Yeah, yeah. Call it pearl clutching or the like, but I won’t be watching either for the same reason. Death isn’t entertainment.
Well said. I truly understand the animus toward religious interference and evil. Taking glee in the death of a priest leading his congregation in prayer, however, seems pretty shitty, to me at least.
As an atheist that thinks religion is pretty stupid, a lot of you are assholes that could use some moral education, especially since I imagine you think you’re morally superior to theists.
I won’t be watching it, because actually watching a guy die sounds horrible. But thinking, in the abstract, about a priest killed by a falling crucifix (very far away from my life) is funny. Like a piano falling on a coyote is funny.
I have no animus towards religion. Sure, there’s some bad religion. I also think there’s some good religion, and I have bo reason to think he was doing anything bad. Most of my experiences with the Catholic church have been neutral or good.
A congregation of worshipers who wear a single bowling pin on a necklace while listening to proverbial lessons on how to knock that pin over, yet still remains standing, the Pin Priest is suddenly rolled over by a boulder.
Wouldn’t that be funny?
Now, let’s try a man in a costume that wants to teach people to be good using a nonsense book as his basis of fact, and prejudice, yet is knocked down by natural forces, or shoddy workmanship…
What’s not funny?
If it helps, imagine Leslie Nielsen as the star of both scenes. Surely you can’t be… ah, forget it. 
Nope. Not funny.
What’s not funny? The bowling pin worshippers or the guy in a costume in a building which should be used (after restructuring) for a school or hopefully a hospital to actually heal the sick, teach the needy, yadda yadda, sans the useless heavy wooden symbols placed above him?
Maybe they could repurpose the building to teach that feeling glee at the horrible and violent death of an innocent person isn’t a good thing…
“Innocent person”? Who?
As you enjoy the amusement this priest’s death has created for you, make sure you assign the proper value to his life. That’s apparently important.
I appreciate the irony of the situation but without further information about the priest and his church I’m filing this under “senseless tragedy”.
I watched the uncut video. A tremendous whack, out of the blue. Zero chance of survival by the looks of it.
Yes, absolutely. It sounds like the punchline to a joke.
But the “I laughed for a solid twenty minutes after watching a guy die” post is one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever read on these boards.
I also wouldn’t want to see a piano fall on an actual coyote.
Ditto. Religion is like violence. A bad but very common human habit it’d be nice to magic-wand out of the species.
And
Yep. As a cartoon it’d be funny. My comments when this came up in the stupid MFers thread was similar.
My own comments:
But it isn’t a cartoon. Too many folks spend too much of life watching it through a vid screen, not living it. That really sets up an emotion-free zone around a lot of one’s experience. And that’s not healthy.
Sure. This was a senseless tragedy. And it wasn’t only horrible for the priest, it was horrible for the congregation. I have a friend who watched an opera singer die on stage, during a performance. (I’m pretty sure it was a stroke or something, not a falling prop. But I don’t think that difference matters.) He was really shaken and upset by the experience. And if we are to draw any lessons from this, it’s “heavy props on stages should be fastened well”.
I think it’s possible to simultaneously hold two thoughts, “what a bizarre and funny death” and “what a senseless tragedy”.
Didn’t some comic quip, “my hangnail is tragic. Your death is funny”? And this death was very far away from our lives.
Yeah, i agree. But If I’d actually watched it, i might have laughed. Because laughter is cathartic and a way humans relieve stress. And that poster did acknowledge that it was a tragedy.
Mel Brooks: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”
The fact that a human being died horribly in a tragic, senseless accident.