Maybe I don't read the right blogs, but Pastafarianism was news to me. Luckily, there is Wikipedia:
"The first public exposure of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and its eponymous deity can be dated to January 2005, when Bobby Henderson sent an open letter regarding the FSM to the Kansas Board of Education. The letter was sent prior to the Kansas evolution hearings as an argument against the teaching of intelligent design in biology classes. Henderson stated that both his theory and intelligent design had equal validity; saying
- ' I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.'
Henderson explained, 'I don't have a problem with religion. What I have a problem with is religion posing as science. If there is a god and he's intelligent, then I would guess he has a sense of humor.'"
Flying Spaghetti Monsterism has its own cookbook bible now, and its satirical acolyte his own website and a following of decidedly secular non-believers. As loathe as I am to put facts before faith, what is red sauce for the gnocci is clam sauce for the linguine and I do feel compelled to point out a fundamental tenet of FSM that does not stand up to even the most cursory of scientific challenges. This is the supposed correlation between increasing global temperatures and a decline in the number of pirates worldwide. The open letter asserts that during the past 200 years there has been a "statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature." Actually, the Jungle Trader regularly reports that piracy is alive and well in the modern era, in a form that would be thoroughly recognizable to the likes of Edward Teach as well as Kansas school teachers. Given that there is also the wildly popular International Talk Like A Pirate Day, we have no shortage of scurvy sea dogs to explain global climate change.
Now had the Church of the FSM cited the inverse relationship between Equatorial Ice Fields and global climate as a core belief, I would have had little difficulty swallowing the rest of it. With a good dusting of Parmesan, that is, and a nice Chianti.
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