I think the only reason the laughter seemed a little freaky to me was because you were able to get yourself laughing so hard on cue without anyone else in the room and not reacting in the moment to seeing the silliness the film but just talking about it… An enviable and unique skill!

If you aren’t familiar with the work of Ernest Becker, I would recommend checking out the documentary “Flight from Death — The Quest for Immortality” which can be seen free on Hulu and discusses Becker’s thesis that religion stems from the basic human fear of death. He goes into the subject in much more depth than that, and critically into the subject of how this soothing belief in an afterlife leads to wars between members of differing religions because when people of one culture are confronted by people who believe in a different religion, this alternate belief system’s existence casts doubt and threatens religious safety from death, and so all of that fear of death is channeled toward this other religion which needs to be destroyed in order to remove doubt and restore certainty of afterlife. Scary stuff.

I still have to see that. But the problem with the close mindedness is that, in reality, a lot of things don’t have a scientific explanation. Just because we have a lot of questions about dark matter or don’t know the etiology of MS does not mean that people need to all start being religious or chalking it up as supernatural.