Flying Spaghetti Monster, the deity of what began as a parody religion and grew to become a social movement. The adherents, who call themselves Pastafarians, purportedly number in the tens of thousands and are primarily located in North America, western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. The Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), which is said to be invisible, is depicted as a floating mass of spaghetti noodles with a large meatball on either side of its body and two centrally located eyestalks.
The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster began in 2005, when Bobby Henderson, a recent physics graduate of Oregon State University, sent a letter to the Kansas Board of Education, which was debating the inclusion of intelligent design theories in high school classes on evolution. The letter, which parodied the reasoning used to argue a scientific basis for intelligent design, stated that teaching about intelligent design must also include the alternative theory that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Henderson received no response, and he posted his letter on the Internet, where it attracted a great deal of popular attention. Articles on the viral sensation were published in numerous newspapers, and fan sites began to appear.
The tenets of the religion, as laid out initially in Henderson’s letter and expanded on in his The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (2006), posit that the world was created to appear older than it is and that whenever a scientist performs a measurement, such as carbon dating, to show the age of an artifact, the FSM changes the results with His Noodly Appendage. Similarly, gravity is said to result from the FSM pushing down on people. Pirates are held to be the first Pastafarians, and global warming is explained as being the result of the decline in the number of pirates since the 1800s. Pastafarians are encouraged to dress in pirate regalia. Friday is celebrated as the Sabbath, and Holiday is observed in late December. The code of conduct is laid out in the eight “I’d Really Rather You Didn’ts.” Belief is not required of church members, however, and dogma is rejected.
Pastafarians have challenged laws that give particular privileges to religious ideas, practices, or bodies of worship in several countries and jurisdictions, frequently by seeking recognition as a religion, with varying degrees of success. In 2011 a Pastafarian was allowed to wear a colander on his head in his driver’s license photo in Austria, which permits religious headgear for official documents, and the colander was later recognized as religious headgear in the Czech Republic, New Zealand, and the U.S. states of Massachusetts and Utah. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was accepted as a religion in the Netherlands in 2016, and that same year the first legally recognized Pastafarian marriage was celebrated in New Zealand.