Flying Spaghetti Monster

• 1. Introduction

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  The Flying Spaghetti Monster first appeared in a letter that a 24-year-old physics graduate of Oregon State University sent in January 2005. His name was Bobby Henderson, and his recipient was the Kansas State Board of Education. Henderson professed a belief that whenever a scientist carbon-dates an object, a creator resembling spaghetti and meatballs is there, "changing the results with His Noodly Appendage". The letter was a joke with a target. It protested the teaching of intelligent design in public school science classes. How did a prank aimed at a school board grow into a movement with holy days, holy books and court cases? What does a pasta deity say about pirates, beer and the afterlife? And can a satire count as a religion in the eyes of the law?

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• 2. The Equal Time Demand

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  Henderson described himself as a "concerned citizen" speaking for more than ten million others. His request was plain. He wanted Flying Spaghetti Monsterism taught in science classrooms alongside intelligent design and evolution. He even proposed the split. One third of class time would go to intelligent design, one third to Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third to "logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence".

  The timing was deliberate, because the letter went out before the Kansas evolution hearings. Its logic rested on a gap. Intelligent design speaks of a designer without naming one, so any conceivable entity could fill the role, including a creature made of noodles.

  Henderson later explained his motive in a few sentences. "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." The board never wrote back, so in May 2005 Henderson posted the letter on his own website.

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• 3. Creed and Calendar

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  Pastafarian scripture says an invisible and undetectable Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe "after drinking heavily". Followers conclude that the Monster's intoxication explains why the Earth turned out flawed. They add that all the evidence for evolution was planted by the Monster to test their faith. That is a jab at certain biblical literalists.

  The Pastafarian Heaven holds a beer volcano and a stripper factory. The joke sometimes shifts the word to mean paint stripper. Hell is much the same, except that the beer is stale and the strippers have sexually transmitted diseases.

  Henderson's website calls him a "prophet". He still insists that "the only dogma allowed in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is the rejection of dogma". Most tenets began as replies to common arguments from supporters of intelligent design, and nearly all of them satirize creationism.

  Pirates hold the highest rank in this faith. They are "absolute divine beings" and the original Pastafarians. According to believers, the image of pirates as "thieves and outcasts" was misinformation spread by Christian theologians in the Middle Ages. The real pirates were "peace-loving explorers and spreaders of good will" who handed out candy to small children. Ghost pirates, in this telling, explain the lost ships and planes of the Bermuda Triangle.

  Pirates were in Henderson's original letter to make a point about correlation and causation. He argued that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters follow directly from the shrinking number of pirates since the 1800s. A deliberately silly graph, with its numbers jumbled along the x-axis, showed temperatures rising as pirates declined. It mocked religious groups that blame disasters, famines and wars on too little worship of their deity. In 2008 Henderson pointed to growing piracy in the Gulf of Aden as more support. Somalia, he noted, had "the highest number of pirates and the lowest carbon emissions of any country".

  The calendar is lighthearted too. Every Friday is a holy day, and prayers end with "R'amen", a blend of "Amen" and the Japanese noodle dish ramen. The festival of Pastover calls for eating large amounts of pasta. During Ramendan, only ramen noodles are eaten. The 19th of September, International Talk Like a Pirate Day, is a holiday as well.

  Around the time of Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, Pastafarians observe a vaguely defined "Holiday". It has no set date and no required rituals, because Pastafarians "reject dogma and formalism". They read the growing use of the phrase "holiday season" as support for their faith. In December 2005, White House Christmas cards wished people a happy "holiday season". Henderson sent President George W. Bush a thank-you note, along with an adapted fish emblem showing the Monster, meant for the presidential limousine or plane. He thanked Walmart for using the phrase too.

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• 4. Spread Across the Internet

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  Within a year of sending the letter, Henderson had received thousands of emails, eventually totaling over 60,000. By his count, about 95 percent were supportive. The other five percent said he was going to hell. His site drew tens of millions of hits, and he also published the hate mail, including death threats.

  He posted the replies from board members as well. Three members who opposed the curriculum amendments answered warmly. A fourth wrote, "It is a serious offense to mock God".

  Bloggers and humor sites took up the cause, among them Boing Boing, Something Awful and Fark. An International Society for Flying Spaghetti Monster Awareness appeared, along with other fan sites. Then the mainstream press followed. The letter was printed in several major newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Chicago Sun-Times. Henderson was surprised, saying he "wrote the letter for his own amusement as much as anything".

  In August 2005, Boing Boing answered a reader's challenge with a prize of $250,000, later raised to $1,000,000, in "Intelligently Designed currency". It would go to anyone who could produce empirical evidence that Jesus is not the son of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The prize parodied a similar challenge from the young-earth creationist Kent Hovind.

  That same month, the Swedish concept designer Niklas Jansson placed the Monster over God in Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam. The image became the movement's de facto brand. At one point, Henderson said, six publishers were interested in his story.

  In Kansas, the board voted in November 2005 to allow criticisms of evolution, including language about intelligent design, in testing standards. On the 13th of February 2007, it voted 6-4 to reject those amended standards. That was the fifth time in eight years that the board had rewritten its evolution standards.

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• 5. Books and Pop Culture

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  Late in 2005, Villard gave Henderson a reported advance of US$80,000 to write The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He said he planned to spend the proceeds on a pirate ship to spread the faith. The book came out on the 28th of March 2006. It uses satire to question evolutionary biology and describes history and lifestyle from a Pastafarian view. Readers are urged to try the faith for thirty days: "If you don't like us, your old religion will most likely take you back". Henderson's website says it has sold more than 100,000 copies.

  Scientific American called it "an elaborate spoof on Intelligent Design" and "very funny". It was nominated for the 2006 Quill Award in Humor but did not win. Wayne Allen Brenner of The Austin Chronicle called it "a necessary bit of comic relief in the overly serious battle between science and superstition". Simon Singh of The Daily Telegraph allowed that it "might be slightly repetitive" but praised it as "a brilliant, provocative, witty and important gem of a book". Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute, which advocates intelligent design, saw only "a mockery of the Christian New Testament".

  A second scripture grew from the community itself. In September 2005, a forum member known as Solipsy announced a project to gather texts from fellow Pastafarians. The result was The Loose Canon, finished in 2010 and offered as a free download. It opens the Monster's voice with a commandment: "Thou shalt have no other monsters before Me".

  On the 1st of June 2018 came The New Testament of The Flying Spaghetti Monster: Dinner 2.0. It serves the Unitarian Church of Pasta and the FSM Revival Church of Ziti. Its gentle rules include "It's Better If You Make Art" and "It's Better If You Don't Hurt Others". In April 2023 a Children's Bible of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was published in Germany.

  The Hunger Artists Theatre Company staged The Flying Spaghetti Monster Holiday Pageant in December 2006. A sequel, Holy Mug of Grog, followed in December 2008. On the 12th of August 2010, the Monster became a character in the Futurama episode "A Clockwork Origin". A 2019 documentary, I, Pastafari, follows the church's fight for legal recognition. Even a deep-sea siphonophore, Bathyphysa conifera, has been nicknamed after the Monster.

  On the microfinancing site Kiva, the Flying Spaghetti Monster group competes to issue the most loans of any religious congregation. Its total stands at US$4,002,350. Its motto, "Thou shalt share, that none may seek without funding", twists a line from The Loose Canon.

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• 6. Teapot and Classroom

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  In November 2007, four talks on the Flying Spaghetti Monster were delivered at the American Academy of Religion's annual meeting in San Diego. One was titled Holy Pasta and Authentic Sauce. The speakers asked what a group needs in order to count as a religion, and whether "an anti-religion like Flying Spaghetti Monsterism" could qualify. Three University of Florida religious scholars had organized the panel. It drew an audience of one hundred, out of more than 9,000 attendees, and angry emails from offended Christians reached the organizers.

  The panel built on a paper in the GOLEM Journal of Religion and Monsters. Its abstract called the Monster "a potent example of how monstrous humor can be used as a popular tool of carnivalesque subversion". Its author praised Pastafarianism for its "epistemological humility".

  Philosophers use the Monster the way they use Russell's teapot. Since an invisible and undetectable creature cannot be falsified, the burden of proof rests on those who claim it exists. Richard Dawkins put it this way: "The onus is on somebody who says, I want to believe in God, Flying Spaghetti Monster, fairies, or whatever it is. It is not up to us to disprove it". Lance Gharavi, an editor of The Journal of Religion and Theater, calls the Monster an argument about the arbitrariness of holding any one view of creation.

  In December 2007, Pastafarians took credit for helping to stop the school board in Polk County, Florida, from adopting new science standards on evolution. Five of the seven board members had declared a personal belief in intelligent design. Pastafarians emailed the board demanding equal time for the Monster. Board member Margaret Lofton, a supporter of intelligent design, called the email ridiculous and insulting. "They've made us the laughing stock of the world," she said. Marshall Goodman, a vice president at the University of South Florida, was weighing a hoped-for "applied science" campus in Lakeland. He declared that intelligent design is "not science. You can't even call it pseudo-science". Lofton did not resign.

  Since October 2008, the local chapter of the church has sponsored Skepticon at Missouri State University. Atheists and skeptics give speeches, and a debate with Christian experts follows. Organizers call it the largest gathering of atheists in the Midwest.

  Justin Pope of the Associated Press praised the original letter as "a clever and effective argument". Critics on the other side saw something different. Peter Gallings of Answers in Genesis argued that the satire works only because the intelligent design movement has not tied itself to a particular religion. That, he said, is the opposite of what its other critics claim.

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• 7. Satire in Court

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  "This is not a question of theology", began a ruling from a federal court in Nebraska. The court held that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a satirical parody religion and not an actual one. Pastafarians were therefore denied religious accommodation under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. The judges wrote that the Gospel is "plainly a work of satire, meant to entertain while making a pointed political statement". Elsewhere, results varied. In New Zealand, Pastafarian representatives were authorized as marriage celebrants. The first legally recognized Pastafarian wedding there took place on the 16th of April 2016.

  The church's website runs an ordination mill for places that require credentials to officiate weddings. In November 2014, Rodney Michael Rogers and Atheists for Human Rights sued Washington County, Minnesota. Their lawyer noted that a $20 ordination from the church could satisfy the rules, which made the requirement meaningless. A few days before the hearing, the county changed its policy to let Rogers officiate. On the 13th of May 2015, the federal court dismissed the case as moot.

  In March 2007, Bryan Killian, a high school student in Buncombe County, North Carolina, was suspended for wearing pirate regalia that he said expressed his Pastafarian faith. In March 2008, Pastafarians in Crossville, Tennessee, placed a Monster statue in a free speech zone on a courthouse lawn. The statue drew national attention and was later removed along with all the other long-term statues. In December 2011, Pastafarianism was among the denominations given equal access for holiday displays at the Loudoun County courthouse in Leesburg, Virginia.

  The stakes were higher elsewhere. On the 21st of September 2012, Giorgos Loizos was arrested in Greece for a satirical Facebook page called "Elder Pastitsios". It mocked a well-known deceased monk by swapping his name and face for a pasta dish. The case reached the Greek Parliament. In August 2013 in Russia, Pastafarians held a rally that was attacked by Orthodox activists. Police charged eight Pastafarians with holding an unsanctioned rally. One later complained that they were arrested "just for walking".

  In November 2014, the church put up signs in Templin, Germany, announcing the Friday Nudelmesse, or pasta mass, beside signs for Catholic and Protestant services. A regional court in Frankfurt (Oder) forced them down, and appeals to the Federal Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights failed. In October 2021, the Templin City Council voted to let the signs stay permanently.

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• 8. Colanders and Licenses

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  In July 2011, the Austrian Niko Alm won the right to wear a pasta strainer in his driving license photo. It took three years and a certificate of psychological fitness to drive. He had learned that Austrian rules allow headgear in official photos only for religious reasons. Some reports said Austrian authorities had recognized the colander as religious headgear. The authorities denied that religious motives were behind the permission.

  The idea spread, mostly in Western countries, with mixed results. Some authorities granted licenses, identity cards or passports with a colander. Others refused, saying Pastafarianism was not a real religion, or that nobody could show a colander to be a religious duty, unlike the hijab or the kippah. Applicants answered that the government has no right to decide which beliefs deserve to be taken seriously. Some even argued that satire itself can be a religious practice.

  On the 9th of August 2011, Rüdiger Weida, chairman of the church in Germany, received a license showing him in a pirate bandana. German officials allowed it as a religious exception. In 2013, Lukáš Nový of the Czech Pirate Party was permitted to wear a strainer for his Czech ID card. An Irish photograph with a colander was rejected in December 2013, and in March 2016 an Equality Officer upheld the refusal.

  The Netherlands produced a long legal fight. Dirk Jan Dijkstra, rejected for a passport, registered the church as a church association in January 2016. On the 1st of August 2016, a Groningen court ruled that Pastafarianism is a life stance but not a religion, and that no duty to wear the colander exists.

  In the United States, Eddie Castillo of Texas Tech University won approval in August 2013. Lindsay Miller of Lowell, Massachusetts, was allowed a colander photo in November 2015, with help from the American Humanist Association's Appignani Humanist Legal Center. In Wisconsin, a man won in February 2016 after his attorney argued that it is not up to the government to decide what qualifies as a religion. Illinois reversed a decision for Rachel Hoover in July 2016. A spokesperson there called Pastafarianism "more of a mockery of religion than a practice itself".

  In Canada, Obi Canuel of Surrey, British Columbia, lost his right to drive in October 2014 after refusing to remove the colander. In Australia, the state of Victoria issued the first strainer license in November 2016. South Australia once seized the legally obtained guns of Guy Ablon after he applied for a gun license with a colander photo. The guns were returned only after a psychiatric evaluation.

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