Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Best News of the Day = Pastafarian Rights

The best news of today, at least the news that made me laugh the loudest, comes from Austria where a Pastafarian has had affirmed his right to wear his preferred head covering on his driver's license photo!
Yes, that is Pastafarian with a "P" and his head gear is a pasta strainer! No kidding, here's the story with photo . As a Pastafarian member of The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster Mr. Nico Alm has had his day in court and won! I tell people who are thinking of going to court that you are never guaranteed to get justice, you are only guaranteed to get a decision. It's looks like Mr. Alm got both.

Check out the Religion Dispatches article for the full story.  And enjoy your next plate of pasta!

P.S. For those who may not read through the whole article, here are the last two paragraphs. I love the Pastover and Ramendon.  For us Zennies who have the Rohatsu sesshin meditation retreat to honor Buddha's enlightnment we might want to consider having a Ropastsu retreat.

While FSM began as a joke, the community that has formed around it has come increasingly to resemble Durkheim’s moral community. Historically, critics of organized religion have framed the alternative as a worldview that is individualistic and cerebral. For example, Thomas Paine stated, “My mind is my church.” What’s so significant about Pastafarianism is that it’s taken atheistic philosophy and infused it with collective meaning in the form of rites and symbols. The image of FSM now appears on car bumpers, necklaces, and as street graffiti.
In addition to Skepticon, Pastafarians have also created International Talk Like a Pirate Day, Pastover, and Ramendon. For functionalists, it is irrelevant whether Pastafarians sincerely believe in their noodly deity. This shared body of symbols and practices has spawned an esprit de corps, uniting philosophical atheists and agnostics into a moral community, meaning that Pastafarianism may well be on its way to becoming a religion—in both the substantive and the functional sense.

No comments: