Last updated 7/2008
Q: Who are you?
A: My name is Bobby Henderson. I’m 27. I grew up in Oregon and move around a lot. I have a physics degree and have successfully avoided a “real” job for years.
Q: Did you really send the Open Letter to the Kansas School Board?
A: Yes. But, I received no replies until after I posted the website online and the School Board started getting lots of emails about it. You can read some of the responses I received here.
Q: Are you an atheist / heathen / what?
A: I don’t have a problem with religion. What I have a problem with is religion posing as science. Teach Creationism in school, fine, but don’t teach it in a science classroom. And don’t change the definition of science so that you can teach these things. That’s retarded.
Supernatural explanations are by definition not science, so why would you teach them in a science classroom?
Religion, itself, isn’t bad. But it isn’t necessarily good, either. There are plenty of good Christians (and Muslims, and Buddhists, and Hindus), and plenty of bad ones.
Dogma is bad for everyone.
Q: You are making God angry.
A: I doubt it. If there’s a God, and he’s intelligent, then I would guess he has a sense of humor. And how do you know He is NOT a Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Q: Do you make money off this?
A: Yes. The Church makes money off T-shirts, car emblems, book sales, and occasionally donations. We are saving a lot of money and pretty soon here we’ll buy our first Pirate Ship which will serve as a floating church, open to all Believers.
Q: Your graph is messed up.
A: No, it’s not. The X-axis doesn’t have to represent time. And the data points don’t need to be in order. A graph is just a collection of data points, I can display them however I want. It might not be what you’re used to, but it’s not messed up. Please stop writing me emails about it (well over 200 at this point).
Q: There are more pirates now than ever. Look at the South Pacific. And song-downloading pirates, and blah blah blah.
A: Real pirates use swords (cutlasses, actually). Those “pirates” in the south pacific are guys with machine guns, cruising around in power-boats. They’re not pirates. And the song-downloading “pirates” are smelly nerds, and therefore not real pirates.
Q: Your grammar/spelling/etc is bad.
A: Yah.
Q: You’re wrong. It’s actually a linguini / mashed potato / dinosaur / elephant / whatever monster.
A: Maybe He just disguises Himself as those things. Also, you’re not funny.
Q: Can I reprint your letter?
A: Yes. Send me a link, please.
Q: Acceptible use of content?
A: It’s ok with me if you’re using the FSM images/content as long as it’s not for profit, and you’re doing it to further the Cause of the church. I.e. printing out FSM propaganda materials and distributing them is ok (and encouraged). Making FSM t-shirts, selling FSM merchandise, etc. is NOT OK.
Q: What blogging/cms software are you using?
A: The recently redesigned site is built on the Wordpress platform with the K2 template.
Q: How many members are there?
A: I don’t know. There are no membership records as such, so I can only guess based on the amount of traffic the site receives, etc. Traffic to date (September 2006) is somewhere in the vicinity of 350 million hits, and around 15 million unique visitors. Google returns close to 2 million results for the phrase “flying spaghetti monster“. So, who knows - your guess is as good as mine.
Q: Why Pirates?
A: We believe that humans evolved from pirates. Consider that humans share around 95% DNA with monkeys, and more than 99.9% DNA with pirates.
Q: Interview requests
A: I’m happy to answer your questions. I recommend you just send me your questions in an email with a subject that I’ll notice, like “INTERVIEW QUESTIONS”. You don’t need to ask permission or set up an interview for some future time, just send me the questions. Thanks.
Q: Website statistics
A: Somewhere around 10k-40k visitors per day, and somewhere around 500k-1million hits a day. Hits are extremely high because lots of people hotlink images,etc from the site. Which is fine w/me.
Emails - depends, but 50 per day is not uncommon. I have 13,839 unread emails right now (9/25/06). I’ll get to as many as I can.
Q: Why is there an FSM banner on my MySpace profile?
A: It’s a virus/worm that WAS NOT CREATED BY ME. I had nothing to do with it. I’m sorry - it caused everyone a lot of problems, and I do not approve of this sort of thing. You can remove it by following the directions here.
More questions? Ask me below, or email me at bobby.henderson@gmail.com
