Praised be the pasta; be touched by his Noodly Appendage! All hail the Flying Spaghetti Monster! Now, I love myself a big ol’ bowl of spaghetti and meatballs, but worship of my dinner seems a bit overkill. If you love pasta as much as Bobby Henderson, though, maybe you would fit right in as a Pastafarian.
Ok, so people don’t actually worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Pastafarianism is a parody religion, created by Henderson as an argument against a ruling that allowed replacement of the theory of evolution with the theory of intelligent design in school systems.
In his letter to the Kansas State Board of Education, Henderson demanded that the school systems divide the teaching time between theories evenly, “One-third time for Intelligent Design, one-third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one-third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.”
Such a request is obviously outrageous, and Henderson intended it to be that way; to him, the Flying Spaghetti Monster had just as much scientific proof and evidence as intelligent design does.
In theory, intelligent design makes subtle references to and ultimately requires that there be an intelligent designer; that is, if entity A and B were created, there would have to exist an entity C which initiated entities A and B in the first place.
However, since we have no solid evidence-based conception of this designer or its nature, we cannot prove that it exists or does not exist. Thus, Henderson argues, any entity that pops up in anyone’s imagination, such as a Flying Spaghetti Monster, could fill in the gap as the intelligent designer just as legitimately as any other.
I say that this is preposterous! Why would an intelligent designer, in all its infinite intelligence with which it created the universe, create a universe in which its constituents were allergic to their creator?
Why make a world that shuns a significant portion of the population, that ignores the pangs of people’s spaghetti-craving hunger? If Pastafarianism were true, then the glory of creation, the source of life, the very core of existence would make anyone with celiac disease sick! Such a design hardly seems intelligent at all. Therefore, I declare the Flying Spaghetti Monster is bogus.
Since I’ve just eliminated Henderson’s under-thought and ill-planned attempt of a stab at intelligent design, I suggest a more practical and more bulletproof intelligent designer which is more friendly to the entire universe: an atom pistol-wielding space monkey. Such an entity can create anything, and nothing is made of anything except the product of the materials of which the creator and his weapon are composed.
So, I invite all of you to convert to an intelligent train of thought inspired by Henderson and his half-witted imagination combined with my philosophical clarification: Pistolicism.
John Culbreth is a music industry sophomore. He can be reached at
Religion at Loyola is a weekly column open to all members of the Loyola community. Those interested in contributing should contact Religion editor Garrett Fonetnot at
