1000 musical fans of Foo Fighters display religion-like devotion

I'm not a religious person. But I respond to emotional displays of devotion that have a sort of religious quality to them.

Such as this wonderful video of a thousand musicians and singers assembling in an Italian field to play the Foo Fighters "Learn to Fly" -- with the goal of getting the band to put on a concert in Cesena, Italy.

 

I was moved by the video. And I'm not even a fan of the Foo Fighters. 

We humans are social animals. We enjoy getting together with other people and doing stuff. We also enjoy watching masses of humans do that stuff. Or watch people who are watching other people do stuff, which is one of the appeals of viewing a football game in a 100,000 seat stadium.

Religions tap into this universal proclivity of Homo sapiens. So did the organizer of this event. At the end of the video he talks about his year-long effort to get a thousand people to play "Learn to Fly" together. 

It worked.

Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters promised that he would come to Cesena. This is a much greater accomplishment than the unanswered prayers of countless Christians for Jesus to return in a second coming. 

The Foo Fighters are going to make a first coming to Cesena. Devotional mission accomplished.

The Rockin' 1000 event was organized last year by Fabio Zaffagnini, who described the performance as a "huge, huge miracle." Zaffagnini used crowdfunding to raise more than $50,000 for the performance, with the hope that it would convince Dave Grohl and his bandmates to hold a concert in Cesena. It seems to have worked. The band later tweeted a link to the video, writing: "Ci vediamo a presto, Cesena," which means "See you soon, Cesena."

Of course, the organizer of the event benefitted from the Foo Fighters actually existing, compared to God and Jesus, who almost certainly don't.

[Note: nit-pickers left comments on the You Tube video, which has over 18 million views, saying -- probably correctly -- that the actual event couldn't have sounded like this, because the audio almost certainly contains just a few drummers, guitar players, and singers, not all 1,000 people.

OK. So what? It's still a great video. We all shade reality to our own liking. It's only when we fool ourselves into believing that the unreal is really real, as religions do, that problems arise.]

Comments

[Skeptical]

Haha clever.