The Church Of The Flying Spaghetti Monster

The Church of The Flying Spaghetti Monster was little-known until 2005. After the Kansas School Board voted six to four in 2005 to require Intelligent Design to be taught alongside evolution in science classes, Pastafarian Bobby Henderson wrote an open letter to the board, pointing out that the identity of the Designer was a matter of religious faith, and requesting that his Deity, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, be included on the curriculum alongside the Christian Deity, God.

The open letter brought this otherwise shy and retiring church into the public eye for the first time.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster (or Spaghdeity) is the deity of Pastafarians. They accept, as an article of faith, that the word was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and that any apprent evidence to the contrary is being manipulated by The Flying Spaghetti Monster's Noodly Appendages for reasons known only to Himself.

In a reply to Bobby's letter, one of the minority members of the school board expressed the view that Pastafarianism was just as logical as the Theory Of Intelligent Design. It has not yet, however, been added to the curriculum in Kansas.

The mainstream media quickly picked up on the Flying Spaghetti Monster as a significant challenge to the proponents of including Intelligent Design in school science curricula.

Henderson's letter not only lambasted creationism, it also poked fun at the propensity for confusing correlation with causality. His open letter tracked the decline in the numbers of pirates globally with global warming, and expressed the view that unless we started rebuilding our pirate population, the Flying Spaghetti Monster would punish us all by warming the globe to uninhabitablility.

Later converts have created International Talk Like A Pirate Day on September 19th, in the hopes of enticing unbelievers to at least help stave off our sweaty fate by pretending to be pirates, at least for one day.

The central belief of Pastafarianism is that there is an invisible and undetectable Flying Spaghetti Monster, which created the entire universe "after drinking heavily."

The religious text of the Pastafarian religion is called the Loose Canon. It contains the Eight I'd Really Rather You Didn'ts.

All evidence for evolution was planted in an effort to test Pastafarians' faith - a form of the Omphalos hypothesis used by creationists to explain away the evidence for evolution. When scientific measurements, are made, for example, such as radiocarbon dating, the Flying Spaghetti Monster "is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage."

The Pastafarian belief of heaven describes it as containing beer volcanoes and a stripper factory.

Hell is similar, except that the beer is stale, and the strippers have VD.

In August 2005, in response to a challenge from a reader, BoingBoing.net announced a $250,000 challenge, later raised to $1,000,000, for "Intelligently Designed currency" by other bloggers, payable to any individual who could produce empirical evidence proving that Jesus is not the son of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

The prize has not yet been claimed.

Recent News

On February 13, 2007, the Kansas school board voted six to four to reject the science standards established in 2005.

In November 2007, Villard commissioned Bobby Henderson to write The Gospel Of The Flying Spaghetti Monster, paying him a reported $80,000 advance.

Also in November 2007, the American Academy Of Religion's annual conference included a panel on Pastafarianism.

While the five academics drew laughs while discussing topics like meatballs, pirates and "saucy baptisms," they spent most of the time discussing how the faith illuminates their own debates over the secular versus the profane, the fake versus the real, and the roles of communities and parody in religion.

Central questions included - is this all it takes to start a religion? A self-styled prophet and some publicity? Or is something more required?