I was actually thinking the very same thing. Because of traumatic experiences involving criminals, I pretty much applaud when any of them are injured or killed. I have been criticized for posting those kinds of feelings in the past. In this instance involving what appears to be a good man doing something he valued and loved, his death is a joke. Don’t blame the SDMB, though, it’s people in general.
My first thought was the priest dying in The Omen. Second thought- what caused it? I assume it was suspended by wires but what caused them to fail?
Agreed.
If this guy was preaching the death and destruction of those who disagree with him, and a physical representation of his purported “lord and savior” violently ended that talk, I’d consider it with some amusement.
This is not that. It’s just a man getting killed on camera.
I do not think it is a senseless accident at all. Some negligent asshole obviously failed to anchor that thing properly, guaranteeing it would fall. This was no natural disaster.
How long had it been since was installed?
Yeah, I don’t know anything about the late Father Sanchez Molinari, but I know of no reason to consider his death funny.
Could such a scenario be funny in a cartoon? Sure, potentially. There are a lot of ways to die that are funny in cartoons that people don’t make gleeful posts about when they happen in real life to random strangers.
(As a Jew, I can’t help wondering if there would be this same kind of enjoyment of, say, footage of a rabbi getting killed during services in some kind of freak accident with a falling Torah scroll, and how that would come across.)
Well, one other thing it definitely is not is ‘funny’. That was all I was trying to say.
Many churches are dirt poor. Lack of maintenance due to lack of funds is a very real possibility. There are many old cathedral like churches in Chicago. They were built like fortresses but, after a century or more, the architecture has been slowly eroding. About a year or so ago, a steeple on one of those old churches just finally gave way, so they tore it down.
The late Father Sanchez Molinari, who as far as anybody knows was completely innocent of any crime making him liable to the death penalty (or any lesser penalty for that matter), much less extrajudicial immediate destruction.
I mean, dude, it was gross enough if you were just toddler-snickering because teeheehee man in ceremonial robes getting suddenly crushed by huge falling object is funny like cartoon. When you start trying to cover your ass by insinuating that this random accidentally killed human being somehow deserved it, that’s just disgusting.
I’ll take “Things I never thought I’d see Czarcasm say” for $600
Its not in the bible, but its a fact-shit happens.
Weird how some impute divine justice to simple accidents.
It seems reminiscent of the disparate reactions to the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO (and/or Charlie Kirk, et al):
Which is becoming yet another kind of societal Rorschach Test.
We don’t know any of the details. Maybe it was carefully and safely installed 150 years ago and a critical piece rusted away, out of sight. Maybe a small earthquake damaged the attachment, and no one could see the damage, and it was literally a natural disaster. (I once had a toilet tank crack during a tiny earthquake, and our basement flooded.) Maybe someone criminally tampered with it immediately prior.
If there were a rash of similar events, I’d feel like someone should do something about it. If it was a rash of similar events near me, i might even think that someone was partially me, and i might suggest my local legislators addressed it in the building codes. As a one-off, far away, I’m inclined to file it under “senseless tragedy”.
This DOES seem like exactly the sort of thing you’d do in a Hitman game for extra thematic points or whatever.
That this board is made up of different individuals with divergent sensibilities?
Despite all the accusations of group think it is exactly what I would expect. There are some here who have great antipathy to organized religion of any kind, others specifically to Christianity, and to them the irony of a priest presumably preaching how Christ (and the Church) will save you is fitting.
To others of us? If this was during a sermon in which he was preaching that God will strike down unbelievers, or homosexuals, or whatever … yeah funny. If the priest was preaching love your neighbor and take of each other whatever your beliefs … tragic.
And still others to organized religion of any kind on the assumption that they all basically work like Christianity.
The funny part is how the priest died. Hit by ceiling tile? Shot by spree shooter? Fallen through rotten floor? Not funny. Bonked on the head by a giant crucifix? Hilarious. Maybe not quite a “hoist by his own pitard”, but definitely a high-level ironic death. The funniest part about it (for me) is not his instant death but how the congregation will handle it. For non-believers, it was a completely random accident. But for people who are raised to believe that everything happens for a reason, they gotta be spending a lot of time wondering exactly what God meant when he whacked the priest with Jesus. And that is hilarious.
Well, there’s the apocryphal story of the death of Charles-Valentin Alkan, which may in turn have been inspired by a story about Aryeh Leib ben Asher Gunzberg, but neither really meet the same criteria for “hilarity”.
‘Ironic’ is not synonymous with ‘funny’ especially when the irony involves the death of a human being. I don’t know, maybe I’m weird, but I don’t find the fact that any human being was killed by a large falling object to be funny under any circumstance.
Here’s a laugh riot for all of you who are enjoying the crushed priest story-- there’s a scuplture of a giant blue horse at the Denver airport. Did you know the horse fell on the sculptor and killed him? Hilariously ironic! Try not to bust a gut laughing…
What if a big (capital) T from a Trump building fell on Trump?