After my posts of the past few days touching upon Governor Perdue’s prayer service in Georgia, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the one of the AP’s top stories today touches upon a different divine figure — the Flying Spaghetti Monster:
It was the emergence of this community that attracted the attention of three young scholars at the University of Florida who study religion in popular culture. They got to talking, and eventually managed to get a panel on FSM-ism on the agenda at one of the field’s most prestigious gatherings.
The title: “Evolutionary Controversy and a Side of Pasta: The Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Subversive Function of Religious Parody.”
“For a lot of people they’re just sort of fun responses to religion, or fun responses to organized religion. But I think it raises real questions about how people approach religion in their lives,” said Samuel Snyder, one of the three Florida graduate students who will give talks at the meeting next Monday along with Alyssa Beall of Syracuse University.[...]
The authors recognize the topic is a little light by the standards of the American Academy of Religion.
“You have to keep a sense of humor when you’re studying religion, especially in graduate school,” Van Horn said in a recent telephone interview. “Otherwise you’ll sink into depression pretty quickly.”
The FSM phenomenon arose out of the fuss over the Kansas School Board’s proposal to incorporate intelligent design into the state’s science curriculum. The original FSM “follower” demanded, with tongue firmly-in-cheek, that his views be given equal time since, after all, the existence of the FSM couldn’t be disproven, because the FSM is omni-present, changing scientific measurements that might contradict FSM’s existence with “His Noodley Appendage”.
One wonders how long it will take before the FSM’s followers outnumber “Bob”’s.