but i think it as gotten way out of hand when you sale a book and other stuff
but nice to see that you can make money off of anything
just think of the pet rock, some one made a lot of money off of that too and it was just as dumn
Nathanial Reed
The Church is funded entirely by your purchases of FSM merchandise. Thank you for your support.
An elaborate spoof on Intelligent Design, The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is neither too elaborate nor too spoofy to succeed in nailing the fallacies of ID. It's even wackier than Jonathan Swift's suggestion that the Irish eat their children as a way to keep them from being a burden, and it may offend just as many people, but Henderson, described elsewhere as a 25-year-old "out-of-work physics major," puts satire to the same serious use that Swift did. Oh, yes, it is very funny. -- Scientific American
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. This means you're free to use the content but not sell it. More Details |
I absolutely ignore the spelling errors and functional mistakes of my fellow Pastafarians! But this is because we are mostly writing casual “chat-style” responses. Formal letters, especially those meant to insult people, should always be written using the best technique possible. I know nothign about math and science, and I don’t try to pretend otherwise. However, if I needed to use, say, long division to prove a point or to insult someone, I would look over it first. He just gives us more reasons to make fun, and that’s not fair to him, and he should know that. Besides, I could just say “Hey, dude, you’re a moron!” but it’s more fun to point out exactly WHY… I think people should have it clearly spelled out to them (ha! English humor) exactly WHY they’re dumb. You may have noticed, however, that at first I was so appalled by the illiteracy demonstrated in EVERY piece of hate-mail.. and that now I’ve come to accept it, and I have moved past condescension and on, instead, to everyone’s favorites: cynicism and sarcasm. These are much more entertaining.
Indeed they are. Ispeshully sarcasm.
I feel that a lot (not all) of the preachy and “burn in hell” letters have been written by the young-ish (adolescent?). I think their illiteracy is a result of preachers considering the indroctrination of “biblical principles’ (is that term an oxymoron or just moronic?) more important than teaching them to read and write. Besides if they are taught basic literacy skills, it may not be good thing for their masters. I mean come on, next thing these kids will be wanting to place their own interpretations on the bible, will be able to read other points of view correctly and will be wanting free will/thought ect. The congregation numbers keep the money rolling in. We can’t have them straying.
RAmen
re We can’t have them straying.
Not that it is likely as they have all been terrified about going to hell. Personally, I call that child abuse.
There’s currently a debate here in the UK about faith-based schools (an oxymoron if there ever was one). Freedom of religion and religious expression is enshrined in human rights; why can’t freedom from religious indoctrination be similarly respected? I dream of a day when it will be a criminal offense to force-feed children in this way - it’s such a harmful thing to do. Of course, the “major” religions will resist, kicking and screaming all the way - they’d be extinct within a couple of generations if we could get their hands off the youngsters, after all.
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Mind you, I dream a lot of things, and I take great comfort in the knowledge that the dream involving myself, the Minogue sisters and a couple of buckets of warm custard is statistically more likely to come true than the one mentioned above. And if nothing else, there’s those Stripper Factories to look forward to…
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RAmen to that!
Well said Davey. RAmen. I’m in Oz and in the past few years the zealot infomercials have taken over the TV channels on Sunday mornings, when I suppose a lot of kids are watching while mum and dad catch up on sleep ( now they would be a rarity). I say bring back the cartoons and let them use their imagination for fantasy not fear. Mind you I haven’t actually had a telly for about a year now so I’m not sure what is current but if we are following the States along that path, as in many others, I shudder to think.
Again
RAmen
ps my dreams don’t involve the Minogue sisters but apparently there are male strippers in FSM heaven.
The reason that we pastafarians need to sell merchandise to support our religon is that it is a PROTEST not a joke. We are protesting the teaching of ID in public school science classrooms not just trying to make people angry. If we don’t have anything to show people they probably won’t take us seriously.
The whole spelling thing is totally dead. How about everyone forgets the whole subject and debates using reason instead of arguing about whether it is OK to make fun of other peoples grammer.
I completely agree with you, nikkiee
Nikkiee (and I don’t mean to single you out, other than to respond to your post):
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The whole “they started it” argument is so tired. You can justify anything with that. They’ll argue FSM started it with the letter to the Kansas BOE. Of course that was a response to ID. of course that was a response to separation of Church and State. Of course that was a response to the oppression of the Church of England. Of course that was a response to the out of control territories of England before the Church. Of course that was a response to the unreasonable monarchy.
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And don’t even get me started on the wars in Iraq and Israel/Palestine.
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Who started it? Who cares? It’s about what you do now. The more you respond to these hate messages, the more you let them plug into you, the more power you give them. And the more you sink to their level, play tit for tat, the less you’ll attract other people to your cause. Which is REALLY what a protest should do.
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I like what pastawy said above. “If we don’t have anything to show people they probably won’t take us seriously.” He was talking about selling stuff, but the same is true for how you exchange ideas and promote FSMism. If people come here and all they see is a bunch of bickering and slamming of people, why should they take you seriously?
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Despite what you might think from the Crusades and Spanish Inquisition and the like, Christianity didn’t spread by blasting other religions. People dont respond well to that. They want a positive vision, and that’s what Christianity provided. Hope, and faith in something greater than themselves. If you want to beat them, you have to beat them on THAT level. Show them the value of questioning regurgitated dogma. You clearly have their attention. What do you want to do with it, really?
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You don’t have to shove someone down to make yourself look taller. Just stand up straight. Show everyone you’re above all of that. It’s what His Noodlieness would do.
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- The Pointless One
It’s always funny when someone spells ‘dumb’ wrong.
Oblio, I have read what you said in your post, and I will have to think about it a bit. Your suggestions seem wise, yet I do not yet know exactly Pastafarians can best respond to the challenges before us. I had an opportunity today, however, to represent the spirit of Pastafarianism in a discussion with a co-worker. I can only hope His Noodliness approved. The discussion was centered around Halloween vs. Christmas. The co-worker said she feels there is a double standard going on in our society because at Halloween, people are allowed to decorate our shared workspaces with images of what she referred to as “the Dark Side.” She felt that at Christmas, people are not allowed to display images relating specifically to Christianity. This led to a larger discourse about people of different faiths respecting each other’s beliefs, traditions, practices, etc. I can only hope that I was not offensive as I pointed out what it is like to live as a non-Christian when Christian ideals, beliefs, idols, and references are everywhere. I do have to say that I have been very sarcastic and quite nasty at times in posts on this website. I think one main reason why I was able to participate productively in the conversation at work is that I can come here to this site and unleash the part of me that wanted to tell my coworker to shove the rosary beads, hanging up over her desk, up her uptight ass. I guess the next phase of my personal evolution is to have meaningful discussions on this website with non-Pastafarians, and I am trying to do just that. I can’t be where I’m not at, I always say.
I have to disagree with you Oblio. Believing in an angry and avenging god, who killed everyone in the world just because he was angry, and now damns almost everyone to hell because they don’t suck up to him enough, is hardly a positive message of hope. It’s a message of fear, hate, exclusion, and intolerance. I’m not the first person to note that Christians who are arrested for terrorizing, torturing, and murdering their children are really acting just like their god. I don’t believe you could look at any human activity that hasn’t been made much uglier by religion; especially by rigid and delusional fundamentalist religion.
I also disagree with your assessment of unbelievers. We DO provide a positive message: That of a world based on compassion and decency without superstition. Many unbelievers used to be believers but found a better, more hopeful, and more moral, way in unbelief. The humanist ideals of the 20th century are one of the finest achievements of our species, and they are almost antithetical to the ‘morality’ of religious fanaticism.
We have tried being positive, reasonable and polite, and it hasn’t worked for us. The fanatics sneak, and bully, and lie, and call US immoral, and try to pass laws against us. I say it’s time to be honest and call a retard a retard. Their beliefs don’t make sense and there’s no reason we should respect them. Their ‘morality’ is repulsive and there is no reason we should allow it to be forced on us.
And besides, lots of us put up with so much of their dumb crap in our day to day life that letting off a little steam is therapeutic.
I find it funny that Oblio mentions the cause of ID being as a response against the seperation of church and state… In a country where the christian majority dictates foreign policy, it is an interesting observation.
FCC,
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“I say it’s time to be honest and call a retard a retard.”
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Now *this* is my brand of unapologetic, right in-you-face atheism!
Unfortunately, in my country, we’ve got laws saying that we can’t rip the oh-so-well-deserved-piss out of people on the grounds of their beliefs. Bizarre, sad and true, apparently the “retards” need *legal protection* from attack by Mr. Bean (see http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,,1698850,00.html).
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Anyway, I say cool. If it looks like an idiot, walks like an idiot, thinks like an idiot, talks like an idiot and believes like an idiot, it’s probably an idiot, a fundi, or member of the US or UK cabinets. If they’re so insecure that they have to resort to such transparent manipulation of the political process in order to “protect” themselves, it surely can’t be long before history consigns this nonsense to the dustbin.
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Thanks, FCC, you’re a constant inspiration.
oblio,
Thank you for singling me out.
i) I really couldn’t give a flying…. what other peoples religion is. I say live and let live.
ii) I like history, but I think it may be irrelevent to teaching religion as science.
iii) I am not a part of FSM to have a religous debate
iv) The children are our future and every extremist “my God is the only one” seems to have no moral problems in using them to further their cause.
V) I refuse to be serious unless you want to debate with me about the “science” of Intelligent Design.
vi) “They” started it when they decided that teaching religion as science would give them a broarder power base.
vii) Could you be a bit more specific about …..everything.
I’d like to point out that along with the obvious, you misspelled your name as well. teehee silly man.
pax
OMG SaucyWench! She said ‘the Dark Side’? Like that crazy christian lady from ‘Trading Spaces’? How did you keep from laughing at her? What a retard! Jeeezus!
Thanks Davey!
Are they really protected in the UK? You can’t call them retards? That’s sorta like admitting to being a retard isn’t it? ‘Don’t pick on the poor jeezus people, son. They can’t help it.’ But of course most of them CAN help it, and that’s what’s so annoying about them.
Davey: I just read the article you attached. That’s outrageous! What I wonder is if you’re now not allowed to tell a preacher that he’s a retard, can you kick him if he won’t leave you alone? That would make it all ok.
Nikkiee: You go girl!