I support the Flying Spaghetti Monster

I was planning to get home and watch Smallville yesterday, until I realised that it ended last week :-( But seeing as I had some time to spare, I thought I'd write about the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which I've been meaning to do for a couple of days.

There are a million links on the subject, so I won't go into detail. Basically, the FSM (and associated religion, Pastafarianism) was thought up as an answer to the Intelligent Design movement. Again, there are a million links that explain this better than I do, but Intelligent Design (ID) is basically creationism dressed up as science. Quoting from the ID wiki page:
"the assertion that certain features of the universe and of living things exhibit the characteristics of a product resulting from an intelligent cause or agent", and "Scientists who support ID claim it has all the merits of a solid scientific theory. This claim is widely opposed by the majority of the scientific community."

The Kansas State Board of Education recently decided to include ID along with Evolution as part of their science curriculum. Now, ID is not science. I'm not saying that religion should or shouldn't be taught at schools, but if it is it should be taught as religion, and not as science. And this is where the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) comes in. There is an alternate version of ID which says that the FSM created the world, and planted a bunch of evidence to make us think that the world is older than it really is. It is important to dress as a pirate when worshipping the FSM, as he becomes angry otherwise. And they present a very convincing graph showing that the rise in global warming is directly correlated with the dwindling number of pirates.

A letter describing the FSM version of ID was sent to the Kansas State Board of Education, saying that as stated by them, it is important that children learn all alternative theories and make up their own minds based on the evidence, and that to not teach the FSM along with ID wouldn't be fair. Quoting the ID wiki page again, "Most ID advocates state that their focus is on detecting evidence of design in nature, without regard to who or what the designer might be." So ID does not exclude the possibility of the FSM.

A lot of sources have now picked up on the idea, and it's gaining a lot of support. Some of the board members have written back to say that they agree, and will vote against including ID in the curriculum. There's a Wikipedia article on the FSM, and a bunch of boing boing posts (check the August archive). There's even a shop to buy FSM merchandise - I have my eye on the "I want to believe" t-shirt, pity about the exchange rate ... And if you're interested, there's a bunch of links available on the pages I've linked to above, plus googling for FSM, Flying Spaghetti Monster, Pastafarianism, Bacontarianism (an Atkins-compliant response to Pastafarianism), The Pesto Manifesto, Spaghetti & Pulsar Activating Meatballs (a rival faction) or any similar terms will get you loads of links, not just on FSM but also on ID, its shortcomings, its challenges to scientists and those who promote the theory of evolution, and the scientific community's responses to those challenges.

Really, there's a ton of material out there, and not only can I not repeat it all here, I wouldn't do it half as well as its already been done. Go and take a look.

Update: BoingBoing is selling FSM shirts via spreadshirt, to support the NCSE. They have quite a range of styles (although only one design), and are reasonably priced: but they don't tell you how much shipping will be (if you're outside the US & Canada), and they don't ship to a bunch of countries, South Africa included :-( And they don't seem to reply to e-mail queries, either - I e-mailed them over the weekend, and still haven't had a reply.

Update: I came across two good articles: Unintelligent Design, and Show Me the Science.