the flying spaghetti monster
Thursday, October 19, 2006
When I was around ten or eleven years old, I made a very conscious decision to have nothing more whatsoever to do with religious faith in general and organized religion in particular. I couldn't say for sure what finally prompted my decision, other than the realization that took years to finally sink in: that only one out of the myriad faiths out there could ever be the right one, and why did the one my Mother have to cram down my throat over and over have to be it?
I have been an atheist every day since.
I was baptized Anglican, but I've endured litanies in Lutheran, Missionary, Roman Catholic, and other flavours besides.
In fact, it was in all likelihood in spite of my Mother switching denominations like a hooker changes sex partners that exclamated my newly found enlightenment, a fact that causes her no small amount of discomfort, I am sure.
And ever since The Day I Woke Up and Stopped Blindly Believing Every Unsubstantiated Thing Other People Told Me, I have tried to learn as much as I can about other religions around the world in an attempt to understand why they exist, and what goals they serve. What it is about their particular brand of beliefs that brings people comfort and makes them think they are more correct (and therefore better) than everyone else? I have spent years in this pursuit and I have yet to come up with a satisfactory answer.
From my view in the existential cheap seats, all I see religion (and yes, that's ALL religions, though I pick largely on xians) doing is fragmenting the peoples of the world and giving them cause to go to war with one another.
I find it fascinating, as well as pants-shittingly terrifying that a person's belief about What Happens After Death informs everything else they do in their lives, as well as causes them to hate and fear and attack and murder others who don't happen to hold the same untestable beliefs about an afterlife that they do.
And this is where we get to The Flying Spaghetti Monster. The product of protest against so-called 'Intelligent Design' being taught in US classrooms, it is the deity of a completely fabricated religion, designed to spoof organized religions the world over.
In the script of life, The Flying Spaghetti Monster is a MacGuffin, an arbitrary placeholder for a creator being that simply says a person's belief in (insert religious Creator-type here, be it God, Brahman, Zeus, Quetzalcoatl, Odin, etc) is no more plausible than an admittedly fictional monster made mostly of durum and meatballs. It shows to demonstrate just how ridiculous and arbitrary the religious beliefs that hold the vast portion of the world's population hostage really are. Wikipedia's great article outlines this parody religion better than I could.
So why did I bring this up? Other than to bring my deeply personal and strongly held convictions up in a public forum?
I just came across an article by a very public atheist, Richard Dawkins, in which he makes a very public case for the end of organized religion before it literally destroys humanity. Its a bit of a tease piece for a book of his that I will get to reading shortly.
I recently read another book along the very same lines by Sam Harris called The End of Faith, which pretty much calls for exactly the same end that Dawkins speaks of.
And I think that Dawkins and Harris may be right: It could be that the time for sitting on the fence and saying that its okay for other people to believe whatever they want has passed. That used to be my opinion, so long as no one was harmed by those opinions. But of course there has been and currently is great harm being done in the name of those beliefs. There has been more blood spilled in the name of religious 'truth' than for any other reason in the history of mankind. (See pretty much any conflict anywhere for proof of that last statement)
Here's the inflammatory interview with Dawkins that got me riled enough to post again about the worst thing to happen to humanity ever, and the pseudo-serious way we can elect to make fun of it: via The Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Here's the official Flying Spaghetti Monster site.
And here's the new t-shirt I am waiting patiently for as of five minutes ago.
Labels: atheism
posted by raistlinsghost at 10/19/2006 01:38:00 AM
13 Comments:
I've been following the Flying Spaghetti Monster since almost its inception. I love that site, and loved to whip it out during creationist/evolutionist debates. There is SERIOUSLY no reasoning with a die hard creationist. Anyway, I'm not sure how you'd classify my personal beleifs.Meh, I don't care. LMAO! I really want the WWFMSD Shirts to counteract the WWJD movement. Oh, and the car emblem. *sigh*
But then, I'd have to explain it over and over and over again to people.
I'll have to check out that book!
I've been aware of the FSM thing for awhile as well, but I only recently started digging around to see how widespread its gotten.
And its huge! Thanks to the internet this wonderfully appropriate (and equally plausible) spoof of xians/ID has garnered an enormous following.
And I'll be sure to post an update with a pic of my new shirt, even though (sigh) you're right: I'll have to explain it to almost everyone.
I am not an overly religious person. However, I find that these arguments that "religion is responsible for most of the wars and ills of the world" is a bit overly simplistic. Greed and fear are the causes of most wars -- Religion is just a patsy.
I have seen atheists who display as much zealotry and intolerance as even the most fundamental Christian or Muslim. If religion did not exist, and we were all athiests -- do you really think the world would be a better place? That we would put aside our differences and unite as a single, unified species?
It seems Dawkins would hold Religious institutions accountable for the misuses of religion (e.g., religious people that teach that evolution is false are the exception, not the rule -- as evidenced by the fact that even in the deepest part of the bible belt, every effort to insert ID into the curriculum has been ultimately overturned).
This would be the equivalent of holding science responsible for the misuses of science (e.g., the Nazis using Darwin's work as the basis for their campaign of genocide).
People use religion to support their own personal biases. If there was no religion, then, rest assured, people would use science to support their biases instead, and we would be no better off.
Thanks for a different viewpoint TJ.
It is true however that a great deal of conflict has been waged in the name of one deity or another. What my post should have said is: 'See examples like the destruction and assimilation of Paganism, The Reconquista, The Crusades, The Inquisition, Northern Ireland', and that's just a taste from Christianity alone)
TJ, you said: People use religion to support their own personal biases. If there was no religion, then, rest assured, people would use science to support their biases instead, and we would be no better off.
Sorry TJ but this is where where we disagree. Those biases are built in to the religions themselves, sometimes overtly, sometimes as the result of following hundreds or thousands of years of specific interpretations.
You also said: If religion did not exist, and we were all atheists -- do you really think the world would be a better place?
Yes. I wholeheartedly believe this.
It would at the very least mean that our civilization was based on the logical confrontation and examination of the world we live in rather than the untestable dogma of (insert religion here).
Finally, you also said: That we would put aside our differences and unite as a single, unified species?
Probably not. But it would be possible because the single most divisive element of civilization would be removed and we could start from a common belief system.
As I said, I see the same RELIGIOUS zealotry among Athiests as I do among religious folk.
Parallels (fill in the blank with the words Muslims, Christians, or Athiests):
1) The world would be better off if everyone were ________________
2) We ______________________ are constantly persecuted.
3) Non-_________________ refuse to see the truth that is right in front of them.
4) Non-________________ are responsible for all the human-caused misery in the world.
Athiests insist that Athiesm is the opposite of Theism, when actually it is just another flavor of Theism. I don't expect you to believe this any more than I expect a fundamental Christian to accept that the Bible may not be the literal truth. But it is true.
Again, we disagree.
Atheism is not another form of theism, it is the absence of belief. I would recommend George Smith's book 'Atheism The Case Against God' for far better definitions of what atheism is and is not than I can give here.
Sorry, but I do not see the parallel between rational individuals using the empirical evidence available to us to explain what our senses tell us and the repetition of dogma by those who will not give that same evidence creedence.
I think people of faith are idiots, living their lives according to the ridiculous explanations written by people who accounted for the nature of things from a position of relative scientific ignorance. And if that makes me sound like those same idiots, well that's an unfortunate coincidence indeed.
Raistlin,
Your belief in the absense of God is certainly rational and reasonable (and I wholly sympathize with this point of view) but it is hardly an emotionless, Vulcan-logical point of view, as evidenced by your emotional reaction in your last comment.
Further, you seem to have no qualms about believing in things that there is no scientific evidence for: e.g., "If religion did not exist, and we were all atheists -- do you really think the world would be a better place?
Yes. I wholeheartedly believe this."
Which means that you appear to only support "rational science" when it supports your point of view (much as some religious folks only believe those things in the Bible that support their point of view), and disregard it when it does not.
"Certainty is the death of scientific inquiry."
This is turning into a bit of a pointless debate, and finer minds than ours have debated this for a few thousand years and gotten pretty much nowhere. Which I suppose is the point.
I'll say only this more: that I object to being described as having a 'belief in the absence of god', as this implies that I am choosing to dismiss something that does exist. Not my point of view at all. I have an absence of religious belief. Ex, one doesn't go around saying 'I have an absence of belief in Santa Claus'. Semantics I know, but still.
And how can there be scientific evidence for whether the world would be a better place if it was composed of atheists? As much as I admire the Vulcan point of view (I am a huge Star Trek fan after all), I don't profess to be emotionally detached from this argument. Far from it in fact. That's why my response was an emotional one.
And I also subscribe to the axiom that 'Certainty is the death of scientific inquiry', but I don't see how religious speculation has any place in scientific inquiry.
I won't argue in circles, that isn't my point. and we do agree on ont thing: Religious speculation has no place in scientific inquiry.
But religion and spirituality offer comfort and solace in dark times. It gives hope to the terminally ill, and comfort to the old and infirm. Religion may not have a place in scientific inquirty, but it does have a place in society, and for the vast majority of worshipers, that place is one of peace and solace, not of violence and ignorance.
I think we could talk about the inherent value of religion all day and get nowhere. Comments like 'But religion and spirituality offer comfort and solace in dark times' and 'it does have a place in society' are in my estimation, imminently arguable.
But I digress. Suffice it to say that you and many that share your views have your beliefs, and me and many that share mine have ours. And very likely, never the twain shall meet.
But I still can't wait for my FSM shirt. ;)
As much as people these days like to make religion the scapegoat of society, it wasn't religion that developed and dropped atomic bombs on Japan.
And name conflicts that were backed by Buddhists, that were strictly Buddhist based wars?
Or Jain for that matter.
It's like saying the US invaded Iraq for Christian reasons as opposed to desire for oil resources.
You're view that religion is the cause of all the wrongs in the world is the same view fundamentalist Christians or Muslims use when they attack unbelievers.
All beliefs are based on AXIOMS
Even mathematics our most basic of formal logic systems is reliant on axioms.
Athiest or Thiest beliefs both are relying on things that are essentially unprovable.
skara: I don't actually believe that religion should be the scapegoat for EVERY conflict. Although it is the root cause for a great many, including Bush's recent War on Terror. Look to Bush's statement like 'God is on our side' for proof that he is at least using religious zealoutry to incite passion for his cause, even if that is not his real reason for making war.
What I actually said was 'There has been more blood spilled in the name of religious 'truth' than for any other reason in the history of mankind.'
If you don't agree with that statement, you do not know your world history.
And your comment 'Athiest or Thiest beliefs both are relying on things that are essentially unprovable.' needs qualifying:
Atheism is not a belief system that REQUIRES proving. It is the absence of religious faith. Meaning an atheist does not give creedence to any supernatural deity. The onus is on religion to be proven, not the other way around. By way of example, I don't have to prove that Santa Claus or Galactus exist. But a believer should be able to.
i believe that the FSM is a great way to stick it to religion. like seriously, if there was a god, y wuld he let ppl fight over who has the real "god" or "gods", and why wuld he let innocent people go and fight kill each other? the way i see it, everyone should be looking for the first civilized culture that existed in the world, and join their faith, as it was the first and most likely the only religion worshiping the "real god" or "real gods". until then FSM FTW!!lol
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