Finally, a religion for the rest of us: pastafarianism. And the followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster are not just satisfied worshipping their god, they have petitioned the Kansas State Board of Education to take their theory of Egghead Design more seriously and give it equal footing with the lesser varieties such as Evilution and Cretanism. They got back responses from three of the less humor-deprived members of the board.
.We have evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. None of us, of course, were around to see it, but we have written accounts of it. We have several lengthy volumes explaining all details of His power. Also, you may be surprised to hear that there are over 10 million of us, and growing. We tend to be very secretive, as many people claim our beliefs are not substantiated by observable evidence. What these people don’t understand is that He built the world to make us think the earth is older than it really is. For example, a scientist may perform a carbon-dating process on an artifact. He finds that approximately 75% of the Carbon-14 has decayed by electron emission to Nitrogen-14, and infers that this artifact is approximately 10,000 years old, as the half-life of Carbon-14 appears to be 5,730 years. But what our scientist does not realize is that every time he makes a measurement, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage. We have numerous texts that describe in detail how this can be possible and the reasons why He does this. He is of course invisible and can pass through normal matter with ease.
[via padawon dot info via boing boing]
I recently read an article in the English Wikipedia about an alleged ancient pagan text called the Book of Veles. Transcribed from wooden planks found during the Russian Civil War, it was later transported to Beograd, where the planks disappeared into the furnace the Second World War. The manuscript finally surfaced in the ’50s in San Francisco in an emigré Russian newspaper. The writing system used is a curious mixture of Greek, Cyrillic, and Devanagri (!). And for adherents of the Luvians at Troy theory, there is a Trojan War episode thhat nicely ties in with my Monmutensic entry title. There are two Russian and one Ukrainian translations online. On one site, it is referred to as the Slavic Vedas. A. Asov has a site dedicated to it, and it seems to form the sacred writings of Slavic Neopagans. It can be seen as an East Slavic answer to the Slovene-Venetic correspondence (see pro and con) which has also flourished on the Web.
John Paul II has died, and I was reminded of the insane popularity of The Da Vinci Code. [via Chicken or Beef?] For a trashy fun and paranoid read on the pope before last, get the, to me, far better novel (under the guise of non-fiction), Yallop’s In God's Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I. Calvi, Gelli, and P2 (Propaganda Due). The funnier parts of Godfather, Part III are based on similar material. I first read about Il Crack Sindona in a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal.
Jack Chick’s minions were passing out his post-psychedelic tracts the other day in my neighborhood. Evidentally they think I’m Catholic because my surname ends in a vowel. Oh, well. Anyway, the sad tale of Murphy the Irish cop who dies before he can finish his sprinkled doughnut gave me pause to laugh. Then I did what anybody else would do in my situation: go online and google the bejesus out of Jack Chick Productions. The best are here:
[Addendum 07/29/04: Thanks to Dave Trowbridge over at Redwood Dragon, here’s a link to the cached Cthulu Chick parody.]
There's an enjoyable article in the Forward [via graywyvern's blog permalinks are on the fritz, so look at last Friday's entry (06/20/03)] that lead me to Matthue Roth's website.
I think one of the things that makes Judaism right for me is, it's sex-positive. I don't talk about sex lewdly or dirtily. And I'm definitely not out to demystify sex. When I talk about it, I'm talking about sex as mystery, as something that I don't know about yet, and especially as something that can exist in a different form than it does in today's world.
I stumbled across graywyvern's blog because of an entry that mentions the poet, Ron Silliman.