Debates over how Earth, mankind created getting ridiculous

Some people believe God and Creationism created everything.  Other people believe Evolution is the culprit. Another set of people believes in a method totally different — Intelligent Design. But couldn’t everything we know and love be thanks to a piece of pasta in marinara sauce?

Intelligent Design is a category in which many theories about how the world came to be fall under.

Some believe God set everything up in a “blue print” and then used Evolution as the method of performing his work. Others believe something totally different for what Intelligent Design really is.

For example, there is a group of people on the Internet that are loyal to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. These people, known as “Pastafarians,” believe that “the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel.”

This may sound ridiculous, but they have a Web site, www.venganza.org, devoted to it. 

FSM leader Bobby Henderson wrote a letter to the Kansas School Board explaining how he and other believers thought. 

He explained he and the others thought it was good that students should hear multiple viewpoints; however, he was concerned that the students would only hear one theory of Intelligent Design.

The letter, which was also sent to at least 10 other school boards, goes on to say that the idea of FSM must be taught along side Evolution and the other theories or “we will be forced to proceed with legal action.”

Henderson also writes about how the Church of FSM has lengthy, written accounts of how the FSM created everything, and he discredits any scientific carbon-dating process by arguing that whenever such a test is taking place, FSM is there and messing up the results with “His Noodly Appendage.”

One requirement of the teaching of FSM is that the teachers must wear the official outfit of FSM — full pirate regalia.  Henderson provides a graph that shows an inverse relationship between the average global temperature and the number of pirates in the world.

Throughout the rest of the Web site there are pictures, drawings and games that involve FSM.  There are sections of pictures and e-mails demonstrating how people are believers of FSM and helping the cause of getting FSM taught in schools.

There is a place where interested people can get involved and links to news articles that have been written about the group.  One such article even showed up in the Kansas City Star.

The Web site has a list of reasons why one should convert FSMism. These reasons include things such as flimsy moral standards, every Friday being a religious holiday and a heaven claiming to have a stripper factory and a beer volcano.

A person can also visit the FSM store and buy shirts, coffee mugs, car emblems and a myriad of other pieces of merchandise.

I love the Internet. You can find anything on the Web, which is exactly the way it should be.

No matter how ridiculous this group might be, the Internet provides an open forum for people such as Henderson to express their thoughts and beliefs.

Such freedom seems fun, so now I am going to try and start my own FSM-type site. Maybe mine will be devoted entirely to Dr Pepper.

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About toddvogts 834 Articles
Todd R. Vogts, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of media at Sterling College in Kansas. Previously, he taught yearbook, newspaper, newsmagazine, and online journalism in various Kansas high schools, and he ran a weekly newspaper in rural Kansas. He continues to freelance as a professional journalist from time to time. Also, Vogts is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), the Journalism Education Association (JEA), and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), among others. He earned his Master Journalism Educator (MJE) certification from JEA in 2022. When he’s not teaching or writing, he runs his mobile disk jockey service and takes part in other entrepreneurial ventures. He can be reached at twitter.com/toddvogts or via his website at www.toddvogts.com.

3 Comments

  1. Just in case you didn’t know… Pastafarianism is a long joke dedicated to exposing the hypocrisy of the so-called intelligent design movement.

  2. Yeah I consider myself a “Pastafarian” and the so called “followers” aren’t really religious, isn’t basically saying how absurd religion is. FSMism was created by Bobby Henderson as an intelligent rebuttal to the idea that creationism should be taught along with science, which is absurd. The whole idea of a Flying Spaghetti Monster is saying how ridiculous the idea of this mysterious God figure is responsible for creating the earth and that it should be taught to children as if it were a fact. If you actually read through the site and were capable of processing what you read isn’t of just looking at words, you would’ve understood how brilliant it really is.

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