It’s nice to see that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is finally getting some serious recognition. After all, he’s on the agenda of the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting. Granted, the title of the talk is, “Evolutionary Controversy and a Side of Pasta: The Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Subversive Function of Religious Parody.” But for a group that dresses like pirates and calls themselves Pastafarians, it still qualifies as credibility.

I think one of the more interesting aspects of this inquiry is the question, what does it take to be considered a religion? At what point do the Masons go from being a fraternity to being a religion? After all, they have rituals, codes of conduct, philosophies, and group identity. What they lack is a mythology. If that is the defining difference, then followers of the FSM should be considered a religion. They have a mythology, albeit a silly one. But silly is in the eyes of the beholder. After all, some aboriginal mythologies sound pretty silly and are taught as fiction in modern schools. How many westerners think the pantheon of Hindu gods, some with multiple arms, others as elephants, etc. is a pretty “silly” mythology? (Of course, no one says that openly because we already have one major religion that hates us and pissing off an additional billion people just seems like a bad idea.)

Noodle on FSM… noodle on.