The roots of this religion stem directly from the protesting of intelligent design. Bobby Henderson (pictured below), the founder of Pastafarianism, created what should be deemed as a movement in response to a 2005 decision made by the Kansas State Board of Education to allow intelligent design to be taught in the classroom instead of teaching scientific evolution. To protest this decision, Henderson comedically remarked how one can't prove a flying spaghetti monster created the mankind and so on and so forth, similar to the ideas that would be taught if following the intelligent design track instead of scientifically proven evolution. Thus, the ideals of Pastafarianism were born and a whole movement of followers would soon rise.
Pastafarianism undoubtedly makes an effort to mock the religion, but specifically the ideas of creationism. Intelligent design is particularly targeted, for intelligent design discusses the existence of God without any real, able to be tested hypotheses. This relates to the argument made by Bobby Henderson, for studies on evolution have evidence and viable hypotheses that help one understand certain characteristics of anthropology.
The emergence of Pastafarianism and such attitudes towards religion, allow one to speculate what truly makes a religion. Such attitudes and disagreements on the creation of mankind have been discussed far before the more recent formation of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Discussions of religion being supported by people who think it's sacred versus religion truly being sacred on its own became ever so present. This was seen especially in The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes trial, where Scopes was convicted of illegally teaching evolution. Scopes was ultimately found guilty, but the fundamentalist versus modernist debate seeped throughout this trial and into American society.
One may view Pastafarianism to be silly or serious. However, the reasons of its creation provide a clear and intriguing argument against the discussions made by intelligent design and creationism supporters.
Sources:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/big-in-europe/501131/
Ha, I did an article on the same topic! Great post though. I really like how you go into the debate over the validity of the religion and whether it should be viewed purely as satirical or as a genuine expression of opinion, in ones take on creationism and the idea of a flying monster who magically created the universe. You do a fantastic job at evaluating both sides of the dispute explaining the strength of the religion in that is clearly states an opposition to intelligent design rightfully so, yet at the same time somewhat demeans the institution of both education and religion. Would love to know more about the debate within the church community, in terms of how other religions view pastafarianism.
ReplyDeleteBraden, I really like how organized and detailed your post was. I also liked the pictures that you chose as they clearly represent the interesting ideas proposed by Pastafarianism. In response to the question that you raised about what truly makes up a religion, I found that the dictionary definition states that a religion is a set of beliefs about the universe that is generally agreed upon by a group of people. Additionally, building onto the idea of Pastafarianism, another concept called Russell's teapot was something that I found to be very interesting as it also opposed intelligent design and creationism. Russell's teapot was a concept that he came up with that if there were to be a teapot between Earth and Mars, no one would be able to prove it, and this would be called the burden of proof. Thus, Russell believed that people should by default be atheist since there was no way to prove that God existed. I think that Russell's ideas as well as Henderson's would definitely be strongly opposed a few centuries ago. Today, however, while some ideas may be seen as silly, people have generally become more accepting, and this allows for ideas such as Pastafarianism to persist.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.dictionary.com/browse/religion
https://www.christiancourier.com/articles/1317-bertrand-russells-teapot-argument