aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Flyig spaghetti Monster at Academy of Religion confab

A panel on FSM-ism is on the agenda at a gathering of the world’s leading religious scholars in San Diego this weekend:

The title: “Evolutionary Controversy and a Side of Pasta: The Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Subversive Function of Religious Parody.”

“For a lot of people they’re just sort of fun responses to religion, or fun responses to organized religion. But I think it raises real questions about how people approach religion in their lives,” said Samuel Snyder, one of the three Florida graduate students who will give talks at the meeting next Monday along with Alyssa Beall of Syracuse University.

The presenters’ titles seem almost a parody themselves of academic jargon. Snyder will speak about “Holy Pasta and Authentic Sauce: The Flying Spaghetti Monster’s Messy Implications for Theorizing Religion,” while Gavin Van Horn’s presentation is titled “Noodling around with Religion: Carnival Play, Monstrous Humor, and the Noodly Master.”

Using a framework developed by literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, Van Horn promises in his abstract to explore how, “in a carnivalesque fashion, the Flying Spaghetti Monster elevates the low (the bodily, the material, the inorganic) to bring down the high (the sacred, the religiously dogmatic, the culturally authoritative).”

The authors recognize the topic is a little light by the standards of the American Academy of Religion… But they also insist it’s more than a joke.

Indeed, the tale of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and its followers cuts to the heart of the one of the thorniest questions in religious studies: What defines a religion? Does it require a genuine theological belief? Or simply a set of rituals and a community joining together as a way of signaling their cultural alliances to others?

In short, is an anti-religion like Flying Spaghetti Monsterism actually a religion?

For $33 you can get a very cool Flying Spaghetti Monster ornament for your Christmas holiday tree.

Via Steve Benen, “Philosophy majors in the audience are no doubt enjoying this modern version of ’Russell’s teapot.’”

RELATED: The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster website, the American Academy of Religion website and a Nova look at the 2005 Dover, PA battle over teaching evolution in public schools, Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, which follows the federal case that resulted, Kitzmiller v. Dover School District. You can watch the full 2 hour program online. An outstanding documentary, here’s the trailer.