Church altar smites devout Catholic A devout Catholic who popped into church to thank God for a his rescue from a lift was crushed to death by a 860lb stone altar, the Telegraph reports. Police spokesman Roman Hahslinger explained that Gunther Link, 45, was "a very religious man and had been scared when he was trapped in the lift and had prayed for release". He …
Does that make it a Miracle?
"a very religious man and had been scared when he was trapped in the lift and had prayed for release"
He can't have been that religious. If I believed there was a God and we all went to Heaven, I'd not be worrying about much really. Unless......I had a guilty conscience. But then most religious people have had guilt burned onto their psyche since childhood.
@KC - surely INRI would be better? (at least in this instance)
just goes to show that attending church is a dangerous thing - i never closed my eyes or bowed my head in school assembly because that is obviously when you are at you most vulnerable.
terminator - coz this one actually won't be back.
This post has been deleted by its author
His name was Link, he was reported missing...
Therefore the Catholic Church (via act of God, of course) had this small "embarrassment" removed, so as not to give any ammunition to the evolution squad...
Mine's the one with "On the origin of species" in the breast pocket, coveted like my own personal bible...
Even God, I guess.
He really was itching to get that guy.
Here's a picture of the altar. Basic table shape and he probably pulled on one of the legs.
http://www.pfarre-weinhaus.at/index.php?option=com_zoom&Itemid=61&page=view&catid=32&PageNo=1&key=6&hit=1
Rest in pieces.
Why is it that religious types who believe in an omniscient, omnipresent God also believe that they not only have to pray for everything (doesn't IT know??), but that more numbers equals better results? (what, they think life is a voting game now?)
I'm guessing that someone, somewhere will use this as proof of God's existence. Or something.
Sigh. The irrationals win again.
I feel bad for Herr Link und seiner Familie, but this is the greatest story I've read in ten years. Even beats the one about Al Gore spending thousands of dollars for gas heating for a guest house.
Although it still doesn't top that one from 1995 when a liquored-up exectuive, Gerard Finneran, three sheets to the wind and having been denied yet another wine because of his behavior, pinched a loaf on the food cart in first class on a flight to New York. Let us never forget this man. He gave mankind two valuable services: 1) irrefutable proof that a title makes no better than anyone, and 2) the reassurance that no matter what we've done, we haven't embarrassed our moms like that.
(Unless we've been on a reality tv show, of course.)
..of the God delusion correcting itself! Soon there'll be scores smothered by their prayer mats, hundreds drowned in the baptismal font, thousands crushed by falling rocks on pilgramage and eventually I'll get some bloody sleep on a Sunday morning instead of being woken up by the local God-botherers bothering God with their incessant bell ringing !!
Pixies, fairies, unicorns, dragons and god.
Fine for fantasies, but that's all they are. Grown adults believing in any of them should be ashamed.
And didn't he think perhaps it was the people that saved him from the lisft that, er, saved him, not the made-up sky-fairy?
We're all fucked given how many people believe this total wank.
Look. Maybe you believe that being an atheist genuinely makes you superior to religious people in every way.
But let me point out one thing -- it is only the insecure who get smug. What's so lacking in your lives that you take pleasure out of someone's death simply because he had a belief you thought was wrong?
Note that I'm not calling all atheists smug gits -- just the ones who act like smug gits. Similarly, any religious person who acts like a smug git is a smug git, so when religious zealots smugly gloat about "devine intervention" when an abortionist has a car accident, they too are smug gits, and that smugness masks a deep insecurity.
Smug is as smug does, and all you smug gits should just smug off and smug yourselves.
I will never understand why people who claim to be religious still insist on visiting a specific building in order to "talk to God". If your god is all-seeing and all-powerful like you claim, surely he will hear you wherever you are.
Keeping in line with the humorous nature of this, I do hope his life insurance policy did not exclude Acts of God.
Seriously, though, you do have to feel bad for those (if any) this guy left behind. Hopefully there was no one left behind, or if there was, those left behind are just as religious as he was (and thus will use their religion as a crutch to overcome this).
It does always amaze/amuse/worry me...
People are involved in huge vehicle accidents, their entire family is wiped out, but they survive... Then they say something crazy like "God must have been saving me for a higher purpose"...
Errr, excuse me, he's just wiped out your spouse, child and parents.... So he's either trying to really ruin your life and plunge you into the pits of depression, or he was seriously trying to kill you and just didn't take the airbag into account!
I still remember when I heard Tony Blair prayed for guidance before deciding to be G Dubya's poodle and invade Iraq... Religion, the only time you can listen to voices in your head, not get given a nice white huggy jacket and still be left in control of a country!
... maybe I should convert after all. This God is obviously more my type of Deity than those who claim to represent God would claim. Wicked sense of humour and low tolerance for people who behave like complete tossers in Gods name.
Man: Thank you God for rescuing me from the elevator.
God: Um, I think that was emergency services - best thank them.
Man: Thank you God for rescuing me from the elevator.
God: Don't you think I have better things to to than that - I created humans with complex-problem-solving brains for a reason.
Man: Thank you God for rescuing me from the elevator.
God: I am sure I gave humanity complex-problem-solving brains. Why do so many of them abandon my gifts [snif].
Man: Thank you God for rescuing me from the elevator.
God: Screw this....
Heavy stone altar in concert with squishy human body: SPLORCH
God [calling out across Heaven]: Hey, St. Peter, get out that old Viking hat again: another one on the way we want to tell this is Valhalla and Heaven is further along the infinite road.
To be fair, while he probably believed he would go to heaven, it might be the form of death that worried him. Dying while trapped in a lift doesn't sound like an easy way to go, so praying for deliverence wouldn't be so weird. Well, other than the whole "talking to the big beard in the sky" weird anyway.
Pirate icon because... I like pirates.
How to deal with the Sunday morning God-botherers:
I used to have this problem with the local fundies. You need to bear in mind that these people have a quota to fulfil; they have to visit X houses in Y time. So I did the unexpected; I invited them in, plied them with orange juice and biscuits, let them put their pitch, and tied them up for the next 3 hours trying to convert them to my own "belief": Agnosticism. I engaged them in an interesting and deep discussion about how God, if such a being exists, must by definition be as far beyond our comprehension as a human being is beyond the comprehension of a skin cell in my little finger. And if we, for all our enlightened knowledge today, can't comprehend God, what chance would a bunch of desert shepherds 3000 years ago have? Etcetera, etcetera...
Unfortunately I was not able to convert them to Agnosticism (I'm a good lecturer, but a poor preacher!), but because I took 3 hours out of their God-bothering time, they must not have been able to fulfil their quota, because they never bothered me again!
Other people I know have also effectively solved the problem in other ways:
My neighbour was watering his garden one morning when they turned up. He warned them off; they didn't take the hint; he hosed them down for their pains. They never returned.
When my brother was living with his then girlfriend (who was quite the hottie I might add!), when they turned up she answered the door - buck naked - and gave them a sweet smile and a seductive pose. Being a Christian couple rather than being on the make, they fled instantly and never returned.
When my friend returned from a rabbit-hunting trip, he was skinning and gutting the rabbits when the fundies turned up. He was covered with blood and rabbit guts; carrying his bloodstained skinning knife, he answered the door and informed them that this was the House of Satan. They fled instantly and never returned.
One of these solutions might work for you! :)
I think this man was being punished for worshipping false idols.
Clearly the Flying Spaghetti Monster reached out with his noodly appendages and toppled the altar. Punishment was either being crushed by a big stone or made to walk the plank. Seeing as there wasn't a plank to hand, the stone had to do.
I think my fellow pastafarians reading this site would agree that the almighty can only have his meatballs pushed so far.
RAmen
Paris as i'm sure i've seen her on her knees worshipping columns.
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” – Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion.
Yep...he's* a nasty bugger!
* He would be if he existed, that is.
Sweet. You said it for me.
If God is all-powerful and created the entirety of existence then why does it matter how many of us worship him? He can still say to the other gods "look what I made guys". If there are no other gods then he can feel proud of his accomplishment.
If the dead go to heaven then he's got plenty of company and sparkiling conversation without needing anyone here on earth pulling at the hem of his robe and saying "I want this, I want that".
If he's omniscient then praying is pointless because by definition he knows everything already.
If god is all powerful then he can kill you whenever he wants and he knows in advance when that will be because he's omniscient. By that logic, he most likely did nothing to get the guy out of the lift - he just say back and thought to himself "the jokes on you fucker, you'll be dead in 20 minutes!"
raving angry loony mentions that "the irrationals win again". I'm just wondering who 'the irrationals' are in this case. Are 'the irrationals' the people with their easy-to-mock belief in some unprovable deity concept? Or are 'the irrationals' the people who find a sorry story of a tragic death hilariously amusing and just the greatest fun, all because the deceased held a belief that they don't share?
@ Steve Swann: how do you *know* he didn't *also* thank his actual earthly rescuers?
Okay, I admit: I work in the emergency services, and I've seen people handling difficult situations through humour. My front-line colleagues generally develop a pretty twisted sense of the amusing because they have to. People on a bloody Internet forum probably haven't had to clear up the crushed body of this man, or break the news to his family. Here, it's just a laugh, innit. It's funny 'cos he's religious. Hur hur. Here, it's just malice, stemming - apparently - from the casual, lazy prejudice of the anti-religious: so confident of their own superiority over the benighted superstitious freaks.
See all the usual staples rolled out: the Invisible Pink Unicorn gets her obligatory mention; and there's the inevitable appearance of the much-abused Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Look, it's not that I expect everyone to take up Catholicism. I'm not Catholic either: to be honest I don't see the sense in it - possibly for many of the same reasons that others here dismiss it. Of course you're free to believe or not believe as you see fit - and if you believe in a vindictive, trickster God (and it's sometimes difficult to know whether people are anti-religious, implying they're atheists, or anti-God, implying they're believers of some sort) then so be it.
But this guy's dead. It's not a joke for him or his family and friends, and I see no reason why he should be ridiculed when as far as I can see his only 'crime' is in holding a belief that we don't hold. The idea that his life is somehow worth less because he doesn't see things as we do - that's precisely the kind of attitude that drove the atrocities atheists are usually so quick to cite in condemning religion. As far as I can see the only thing this guy did 'wrong' was to go into a church and offer thanks to his god that he'd escaped a dangerous situation. Is that really so wrong that you people truly believe he deserved to die, or that his death can and should be treated as entertainment? I mean, atheists attacking the religious usually claim that they're doing so because of the injustices perpetrated by the religious. So what's the reason here? Do we have any evidence - any evidence at all - that this guy had ever tried to push his religion on someone else? Do we have any reason to believe that he thought atheists were satanists. or that he'd ever tried to get creationism taught in schools? Or are we in fact just mocking him because it's become a habit and it makes us feel good about ourselves?
I wonder if this guy would have attracted the Register's attention at all - or anyone else's outside his own home town - if he'd been an atheist released from the lift and subsequently run over on the street.
The altar was a larger replica of this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/baileyblack/1545504824
In hindsight, he really shouldn't have gone hugging it...
(I'll hate myself later for joking about this poor sap's demise... on a more serious note, just how *does* a person knock over an 800+ lb anything?)
"When will people grow up? #
By Flugal Posted Thursday 10th September 2009 16:22 GMT
Pixies, fairies, unicorns, dragons and god.
Fine for fantasies, but that's all they are. Grown adults believing in any of them should be ashamed."
You forgot to add the Higgs boson to your list. After all, lots of otherwise rational scientists believe in it, but nobody has found one. Yet they rely on its unproven existence to 'prove' the rest of their theories/beliefs.
What? So somehow all life is precious and things are sacred and shouldn't be ridiculed? Climb down off your horse.
Not taking anything away from the loss his family feel, but there's 6 billion people out there, every single one of whom will die. There is nothing mystical or amazing about this, simply inevitable. It isn't malice to laugh about a tragically comic event like this.
Everything dies. This is an entirely normal, natural occurence, and nothing to get so excited about. Most people don't die of old age, they die of unexpected causes. Chill out and laugh at it, and yourself.
When I go, I hope it's in some manner that people hear about and cry with laughter about. Bollocks to all this self-aggrandisement and crocodile tears bullshit. Just another person. Same as the battered cod you eat was just another fish, or the burger was just another cow. Nothing to see here.
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