Poland Welcomes a New Religion...Maybe

In a recent court decision, a Warsaw court overturned a lower court's decision to deny the request by a group of people to petition that the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster should be an accepted religion in the country.  Heather Saul of The Independent reports:

A group of Pastafarians who gathered outside the court shouting "pasta" during the hearing on Tuesday welcomed the ruling.

In January, Pastafarian minister Christopher Schaeffer was sworn into the Pomfret New York Town Council this week with a colander on his head throughout the ceremony to represent his unique religious beliefs.

They now have two more months to gather the necessary documents to prove that their religion should be taken seriously.  What is mentioned briefly in the article is that this movement is a direct response to the Intelligent Design supporters’ statement that, while the original ID movement had strong links to organized Christianity, in fact, the “Intelligent Designer” could be anything or anyone. The response was, then, “If this is so, then we believe that the universe was created by a flying spaghetti monster” and Pastafarianism was born.  As parodies go, it is pretty good and the ID folks only have themselves to blame for this, since they refused to be up-front about something that everybody else on the planet knew: that the “designer” is the God of the Bible. They cannot, of course, do this because if they did, ID as a “legitimate” course of study would be dead in the water as far as the public schools are concerned. They have very nearly given the game away recently by linking ID to “essential Christian doctrines”  in a conference at a Baptist church north of Houston.  In the wake of parodies like the CFSM, it will be interesting to see where the ID movement goes from here.