My God Comes in Marinara

In Kansas, a group of religious nutbars on the Education Board are trying to use their voting majority to destroy the basis of Science in that state. In case you haven’t heard, there is a growing push to introduce creationism, rebranded as Intelligent Design (ID), into the Science curriculum. You heard right: Science.

The fact that it is even being debated blows my mind. I’m not anti-religion or anything; to paraphrase David Cross, I want to respect everybody’s superstitions. It’s the overwhelming educational wrongness of this that irks me. It’s like teaching Geography in music class: both are valid topics of study, but the commonalities are so few and tenuous that there is no benefit to teaching them together, unless your aim is to use one to distract from the other.

Then in steps a brilliant, funny, and expanding group of people fed up with ID who have put forth their own theory of how we all got here: the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM). The FSM is a mound of spaghetti with meatballs for cheeks and eyeballs on noodly stalks. The web site starts with a hilarious, obviously unscientific open letter to many school boards, asking for FSM theory to be taught as well, since it is just as legitimate as ID. In fact, many Ph.D. scientists have lent their backing to this claim on the homepage. But I think my favourite part is that in this letter, they use a graph (hard to read and complete with incorrect scale) that proves how the increase of global warming is actually caused by the declining numbers of pirates in the population. Pirates.

You can even choose from an expanding array of FSM paraphernalia, including metal FSM plates for your car (a la the Jesus/Darwin fish), and t-shirts reading “FSM: It’s Sacrilicious!” Awesome.

I think I’ve found a religion (WARNING: PUN AHEAD) I can stomach.