The Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) is the brainchild of Bobby Henderson, who in an open letter to the Kansas Board of Education, created the FSM to illustrate an argument that teaching the controversy of Intelligent Design versus evolution was nonsense – Intelligent design is not science. The thought was, that if we are going to believe in an amorphous creator, why not make it something ridiculous like a flying spaghetti monster. Furthermore, if we are going to give equal time to teaching Creationism and Evolution as theories, then we should allot equal time to the study of FSM as another possibility to explain our existence.

The letter quickly became an internet phenomenon when Henderson published it, and the subsequent responses from the Kansas Board of Education. As with many things on the internet, the idea grew legs (or noodley appendages if you prefer) and new elements were added to Flying Spaghetti Monsterism: International Talk Like a Pirate day on September 19th, Pastafarian Heaven and Hell consisting (in heaven) of a beer volcano and stripper factories and in hell, of stale beer and strippers with STD’s. Henderson blames the flawed Earth on the FSM’s drunkenness at the time of creation and attributes global warming to a historical decline in pirates. The latter was used as a way to illustrate organized religion’s propensity to attribute correlation without causation.

To read Bobby Henderson’s letter, check out his website: http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/