Church Of The Flying Spaghetti Monster – May The Sauce Be With You

My journey to Pastafarianism and the loving embrace of His Noodly Appendage was, I suspect, not an entirely uncommon one.  Once a week as a seven year old my parents would entrust my care, and that of my brothers, to a group of fundamentalist Christians at the local Sunday School.  This wasn’t quite as bad as it sounds, and I was more than happy to put up with all the moralising and threats of damnation on the basis that they had table football and roller skates.

There was an arrangement.  They knew that I, and several others, thought they were all as mad as a box of frogs, but we knew that as long as we all ran around wearing improvised capes pretending to be Batman then everyone was happy and we’d all get along quite nicely.  If didn’t last however, and all came to head the day I decided to cast doubt on Mrs Murphy’s somewhat literal interpretation of the exploits of Noah and his adventures in a big boat.  I thought my questions about aquatic life, microorganisms and the storage of food and water were eminently logical and reasonable, but her face started to twitch and she called my mum, suggesting she didn’t really agree.  Needless to say I no longer spent my Sunday afternoons in the care of fundamentalist Christians.

I spent the next twenty five years in a spiritual wilderness, convinced beyond any doubt that science provided all the answers.  It told us that the universe is nearly 14 billion years old, and that the earth formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago.  It explained how life on Earth emerged in the form of prokaryotes approximately 3.6 billion years ago and remained small and microscopic for at least another one billion years.  Complex multi-cellular life arose around 580 million years ago and fast forward to today and here we are; bipedal, largely hairless apes with our opposable thumbs wrapped firmly around double-shot lattes and smartphones.  This is all fact, and to question this and argue for a young earth makes you a woolly-minded buffoon and oxygen thief.

But I was wrong.  On a rainy November night in London’s West End I left a disappointingly indifferent performance of The Wizard of Oz and went off in search of sustenance, which led me to a quaint looking Italian restaurant in Soho.  And then it happened.  The waiter tripped and the instant the bowl of Spaghetti Carbonara landed in my crotch I felt His presence. There was no pain, only love, and the realisation that He was the creator, He who boiled for our sins was the architect of this world and the one beyond it.

And so began a new chapter in my life.  I was a Pastafarian and I had found peace.  I later learnt that the Flying Spaghetti Monster had created the universe while intoxicated, and this was the cause of the flawed Earth we see today.  Earth is thousands rather than billions of years old,  but for reasons that are not entirely clear He planted evidence of evolution and when there are any findings produced in support of an old earth, you can be sure that He is there, modifying the data with His Noodly Appendage.  He wanted us to believe the earth is older than it is, perhaps this is a test of our faith in Him.

There is much to learn learn about the Church of The Flying Spaghetti Monster, and you should start here, or perhaps you could treat yourself to The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

I will however try to give you a general overview:

• Pastafarianism is currently the world’s fastest growing carbohydrate based religion.
• The only dogma allowed in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is the rejection of dogma.
• Friday is a religious holiday (that’s every Friday).
• We believe pirates are absolute divine beings and the original Pastafarians.  Moreover, we believe they were peaceful explorers and it was due to Christian misinformation that they have an image of outcast criminals today.
• We believe there is strong evidence that the decline in pirate numbers is wholly responsible for global warming and other increasingly frequent natural disasters and that this issue ought to be taken more seriously by the international community.
• Pastafarianism is a real religion and is considered legitimate even by its opponents – mostly fundamentalist Christians, who have accepted that our God has larger balls than theirs.
• The Pastafarian conception of Heaven includes a beer volcano and a stripper factory. The Pastafarian Hell is similar, except that the beer is stale and the strippers have sexually transmitted diseases.

It is with great honour therefore that I announce the belated inclusion of His Noodliness into Room 102 (some observers may point out that as an omnipresent deity the Flying Spaghetti Monster has been in Room 102 all along and always will be, but lets not spoil the occasion and an opportunity to drink lots of beer with that sort of smart-arsed nonsense, He wouldn’t approve).

RAmen to that!

Much of the information here was sourced from the online home of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster at http://www.venganza.org/, which I really cannot recommend enough.  Enjoy, and spread the word!