Personally I find that the Pastafarians are very principled, intelligent people. In fact they're almost witches. But a witch insight into their noodly religion throws up some interesting insights.
First a little history.
As F Scott Fitzgerald once observed, the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. By this measure, the religion of Pastafarianism is the creation of a first-rate mind.
There are two contrasting explanations for how Pastafarianism (officially known as the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) came into being. The first is that an invisible monster, comprising a tangle of spaghetti flanked by two meatballs, created the universe after a bout of heavy drinking. For hundreds of years, his followers – pirates, mainly – worshipped in secret. Only recently has it become better known.
The second explanation is that Bobby Henderson, a young physics graduate from Oregon State University, wrote to the Kansas Board of Education in 2005 to protest against a proposal to teach “intelligent design” alongside evolution in secondary schools. The arguments supporting a scientific basis for intelligent design, he wrote, apply just as well to a universe created by a flying spaghetti monster. Source
The first and most immediate observation is that I looove intelligent design because it paints fundament-alists firmly into a corner. The particular corner is that if creation shows God's design, then he very cunningly designed the human male with his g-spot best reached up the bum. Don't blame me, it's God who designed us for gay sex.
Apart from that titbit calculated to have fundament-alists foaming at the mouth, intelligent design is totally dreary and has the slight problem to overcome that we have a goddam tail bone. Evolution is more intelligent (plus the empirical method doesn't claim to have all the answers) and Pastafarianism is more fun.
However if it is a spoof, from a magical point of view there is a danger in creating gods. Consider for a moment the Simon Necronomicon:
Both the introduction and the book's marketing make sensational claims for the book's magical power. The back blurb claims it is "the most potent and potentially, the most dangerous Black Book known to the Western World," and that its rituals will bring "beings and monsters" into "physical appearance". The book's introduction gives readers frequent warnings that the powers it contains are potentially life-threatening, and that perfect mental health is needed; otherwise the book is extremely dangerous. It claims a curse afflicted those who helped publish the book. It also claims that the Golden Dawn methods of magical banishing will not work on the entities in this book. Source
The reason I bring up the Simon Necronomicon is that in a magical world view thoughts are things. If you think something, it is actually created, but not necessarily visibly on this plane. I don't think for an instant that when Lovecraft brought the Necronomicon thought form into being it would take on the independent life that it has an would become an actual paperback grimoire used by kids unprepared for the consequences. This book gives many examples of the real world results of using a grimoire, and the warnings are true.
The application to the FSM of course is that the monster is another thought form which has become an egregore and taken on its own existence. Without meaning to he has created a god and in fact the page I link at the top says that it's as if things are just happening on their own.
So be careful what you think!
Let's end appropriately with an FSM hymn.
