Parody religions are about asserting personal freedom, rebelling against well-established systems of beliefs

Sep 20, 2014 23:33 GMT  ·  By

Earlier this week, I got to write about some woman in Oklahoma, US, whose driver’s license photo shows her wearing a spaghetti strainer on her head.

The woman, named Shawna Hammond, says that she put the kitchen utensil on her head for her very special photo shoot at the local DMV not because she wanted to make the news, but to attest her affiliation to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

I must admit that, at first, I thought that Shawna Hammond’s story was – how should I phrase this so as not to sound too butch vocabulary-wise? – whatever is left of a bowl of grains after it goes through a bull’s digestive tract.

Then, I turned to Google the All-Knowing and, much to my surprise, found that there actually was such a thing as the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and that the deity it worshipped was, as you probably already suspect, the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Once again, I was quick to jump to conclusions and decided that one would have to be totally nuts to become a member of such a thing as the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. To be perfectly honest, it took me a while to figure out that I could not be more wrong.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with having such religions in the world. In fact, they’re actually quite useful, regardless of what some might think and say about them.

But, before I tell you why I think that such religions are useful, let’s spare a few paragraphs to talk about the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

A parody religion is born

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has only been around for a few years. Those affiliated to it call themselves Pastafarians, a name derived from the official moniker for this movement: Pastafarianism.

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was started back in 2005 by a man named Bobby Henderson, who first referenced Pastafarianism in a letter protesting the Kansas State Board of Education's proposal that intelligent design be taught in schools as an alternative to the theory of evolution.

In his letter, Henderson argued that, as long as it was OK to teach intelligent design in schools, kids should also be exposed to his system of beliefs, i.e Pastafarianism, in an organized manner.

Mind you, Bobby Henderson wasn’t really looking to have Pastafarianism taught in schools. All he wanted to do was to poke fun at the idea of having intelligent design taught alongside biological evolution.

Shortly after this man’s letter hit the public eye, the entire idea of a Church of a Flying Spaghetti Monster snowballed, and now Pastafarianism is a religion through and through. Or at least that’s what its supporters say. Regular folks – myself included – call it a parody religion.

As mentioned, Pastafarianism is all about pledging your alliance to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which is a supernatural creator made of spaghetti and meatballs. According to Bobby Henderson, pirates were the original Pastafarians.

Now that there aren’t all that many pirates left in the world, things are going from bad to worse. More precisely, Bobby Henderson and fellow Pastafarians say that global warming and climate change are due to a global shortage of pirates.

Nothing wrong with having parody religions

I don’t know about you, but I for one see absolutely nothing wrong with having parody religions like Pastafarianism in the world. On the contrary, I think that they very much come in handy.

What I mean is that, at the end of the day, such movements are about asserting personal freedom, especially freedom of thought, and rebelling against well-established belief systems that have been around for centuries.

I’m not trying to belittle anybody’s religion. We all have the right to believe in whatever we may choose, which is exactly what parody religions are all about: reminding people about the importance of personal freedom.

Not to sound all-knowing or anything of the sorts, but something tells me that there is not a person in this world who does not want to feel free. And since none of us likes to have things shoved down our throats, let’s not do this to others.

To put it in a nutshell, if they want to worship a supernatural creator made of spaghetti and meatballs, let them do it. It’s their way of asserting their freedom.