Although I think members of religions without a hell probably have a fear of death too, so go figure..

This is not to say that non-religious are not afraid of death. But the behaviour of religious ones, especially of those who expect a better life after death, pose a conundrum: why are they afraid so much *more*?

If you feel empathy with the man’s initial reaction (going to church to thank God at being rescued from the lift) you feel bad for him dying, you think “that could have happenned to me.”

If you think that going immediately to church to thank God that people rescued you from a lift is a bit silly then you are more likely to laugh at what happens to him in Church.

In other words, the more religious you are the less funny you will find the story. I think that works with other situations too.

On the laughing vs empathy I don’t think it’s an either/or. But I’m unable to really laugh at the man in the church too much since that death was a true accident but from a certain perspective the other death was no accident.

Supporting the same regime that kills your family is a specialty of dictatorships: my own great-grandmother was largely a supporter of everything despite her husband dying in the Gulag during one of Stalin’s purges. But for a generation who knew no different, it would have been much easier to mentally draw a difference between the “bad” communists like Stalin and the “good” communists rather than question the whole thing.

Well, I do admit to a predisposition to laughing at such ironic tragedies of religion. But, really, there’s nothing different in either story, other than one being religious, the other political.

Well, let me offer an explanation: This man must have been a sinner. And thus he was punished. Right?

As for jokes, the best Jewish jokes I am aware of I know from Jewish people directly. We have to have the ability to laugh at ourselves as well as make jokes about taboo subjects.

It’s not just in the early days of the Soviet Union that many from the left in the west supported the USSR. It happened in the 60s too. And sometimes it happened because people believed in a Utopia. A wonderful dream. A society were you are not struggling to compete with your neighbour for more money but where you promote freedom, justice, progress, etc., through your work, your art, your science. If you lived under a western-style dictatorship chances are that you might have been lured by the Soviet Utopia. Yes, many people (and many smart people, not village idiots) wholeheartedly believed that they could help build a new society. Many intellectuals were lured by communist awards, visits, honours, … when in their country they could not find recognition. This is human nature. We have to smile at it. But we also have to learn some lessons for the future. And this is why we should look at what happened and never substitute rational though by any propaganda, no matter how sweet it may be.

In December 1989 I found myself at the Berlin wall, on the east side, having been invited by the head of the Probability Division of the Mathematics Department at Humbolt University. Just before I went there, the guy committed suicide (most likely explanation is that his father was a Stalin victim while he himself grew up to believe in Utopia and support it–otherwise he could never have been a head of a department in East Germany–and, all of a sudden, overnight, he saw his dream collapse).

On my way back to the West, I went through the wall along with thousands of Germans. Chaos. I even managed to miss my plane back to France. And I was depressed of the whole situation, deeply touched by what I saw and the fact that my host had taken his life with his own hands because Utopia went away.

But, yes, we have to smile…

I’m not sure WP lets you delete comments you’ve made — I can edit it.

Also based on what I just looked up now, didn’t these people emigrate from France and immigrate to the USSR?