Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

[StoneMtn]

An open letter to various school boards, from the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster:

I am writing you with much concern after having read of your hearing to decide whether the alternative theory of Intelligent Design should be taught along with the theory of Evolution. I think we can all agree that it is important for students to hear multiple viewpoints so they can choose for themselves the theory that makes the most sense to them. I am concerned, however, that students will only hear one theory of Intelligent Design.

Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.

It is for this reason that I’m writing you today, to formally request that this alternative theory be taught in your schools, along with the other two theories. In fact, I will go so far as to say, if you do not agree to do this, we will be forced to proceed with legal action. I’m sure you see where we are coming from. If the Intelligent Design theory is not based on faith, but instead another scientific theory, as is claimed, then you must also allow our theory to be taught, as it is also based on science, not on faith...

----Click here for the rest of the letter and to see their website----

[d_rawk]

Haha. That's cute.

Just call me the fun police, but ...

Wouldn't intelligent design, taken as a neutral theory, suggest something like: where there are unexplained gaps or phenomena which can not be (yet) accounted for through processes of biological selection alone, and where such phenomena could equally be taken to be suggestive of a guiding or purposeful principal at work in their development where the prevailing notion of directionless development and random mutation has not adequately been empirically demonstrated to be the entirety of the mechanism behind such developments, it is no less reasonable to consider the possibility of such purposeful intentionality (or design) than it is to consider - in what would amount to an act of faith - that the presently dominant notions of unguided naturilistic development will eventually prove sufficiently robust to account for such deficiencies?

That is, wouldn't it suggest (again, if treated responsibly) that to believe the Flying Spaghetti Monster was the source of said intentionality, or to believe that the Christian God was the source of said intentionality, or whatever, well that's fine, but a matter of personal religious conviction and not the point. Because we can not investigate the *source* of said intelligent impetus, our concern can only be to investigate whether or not there are sufficient grounds to believe that there *may be* such a source, quite apart from attempting to *identify* such source (in the absence of empirical methods of doing so).

So it wouldn't be an "alternative theory of Intelligent Design". It would be a peculiar quirk of the letter writter, and quite irrelevant to the theory itself.

Of course, this isn't what the Dover Area School District are doing, and I don't doubt at all that they are closet creationists of the literalist Christian variety, co-opting ID much as market capitalists co-opt natural selection to justify their economics, or as others do to justify "social Darwinism".

I'm no big fan of Intelligent Design theory. But I think that it is often being wrongly conflated with book of genesis-style creationism, and that this actually plays into the hands of those who want to push their God on people ... like those in Dover.

[shainhouse]

My floor hockey team is the 'flying spaghetti monsters.'

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

I hate replying to thread saying that I wish I had more time to respond to that thread...!

[shainhouse]

yeah, me too... that's why I filled it with nonsense. It's an interesting debate and the satire that's been created from it sparks some major questions what's being taught to these kids.

[StoneMtn]

hahahaha

I know, and I knew this was just the crowd that would not only get the humour, but the serious implications of the post, as well.

It appears, however, that d_rawk is the only one among us who isn't too lazy today to get into this. (Frankly I'm quite surprised that the Evil Mouse didn't engage; and almost disappointed.)

And where the hell is Deeps?

[timouse]

new avatar anyone??

[arcane]

(Humour along similar lines, posted to the Ottawa and Gatineau Pagan Peer Group)

A Little Pagan Parenting Humor

A letter from a 3rd grade teacher sent home to Pagan parents:

By: Ld Obyron Irondrake

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Thomas,

I write this letter in concern of your daughter, Aradia Moon. Please don't take this the wrong way, however, although she is a straight A student and a very bright child, she has some strange habits that I feel we should address.

Every morning before class, she insists on walking around the classroom with her pencil held in the air. She says she is "drawing down the moon." I told her Art Class is in an hour and to please refrain from then to do any drawing. And speaking of Art Class, whenever she draws a night sky, she insists on drawling little circles around all the stars and people dancing on the ground. And that brings up dancing, I had to stop her twice for taking off her clothes during a game of Ring Around the Rosey! By the way, what does the term "skyclad" mean?

Aradia has no problem with making friends. I always find her sitting outside during recess with her friends sitting around her in a circle. She likes to share her juice and cookies. It is nice how she wants no one to ever thirst or hunger. However, when I walked over to see what they were doing, she jumped up and told me to stop, pulled out a little plastic knife and started waving it in front of me. I thought this was a bit dangerous, so I took her to the Principal's Office. She explained to the Principal that she was opening the Circle" to let me in. She also said that her Mommy and Daddy always told her not to play or run with an "athame" in her hand, that she could put someone's eye out. I don't know what an "athame" is, but I am glad that she keeps it at home.

As for stories, your daughter tends to make up some whoppers. Just yesterday while I was talking sternly to Tommy Johnson and shaking my finger at him, he started screaming and ran from the room. When I finally caught him, he told me that Aradia told him and the rest of the class that the last time I shook my finger at someone, they caught the chicken pox. I explained to him that the Sally Jones incident was just a coincidence, and that things like that don't really happen.

One of the strangest things that happened was when I asked the children to bring in Halloween decorations for the classroom. Aradia brought in salt, incense and her family album. I see she has quite a sense of humor. One of Aradia's worst habits is that she is very argumentative. We were discussing what the Golden Rule was (Do Unto others as you would have them Do Unto You) she firmly disagreed with me and stated it was "Do As You Will, but Harm None" and she will not stop saying "So Mote It Be" after she reads aloud in class. I tried to correct her on these matters and she got very angry. She pointed her finger at me and mumbled something under her breath.

In closing, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas, I would like to set up a parent/teacher conference with you sometime next week to discuss these matters. I would like to see you sooner, but I have developed an irritating rash that I am quite worried about.

With Deep Concerns,

Mrs. Livingston

P.S. Blessed Be. I understand that this is a greeting or closing from your country that your daughter informs me is polite and correct.

[phorbesie]

i can never understand any of your posts!

too many big words for me, hehehe

i mean, like this:

Just call me the fun police, but ...

Wouldn't intelligent design, taken as a neutral theory, suggest something like: where there are unexplained gaps or phenomena which can not be (yet) accounted for through processes of biological selection alone, and where such phenomena could equally be taken to be suggestive of a guiding or purposeful principal at work in their development where the prevailing notion of directionless development and random mutation has not adequately been empirically demonstrated to be the entirety of the mechanism behind such developments, it is no less reasonable to consider the possibility of such purposeful intentionality (or design) than it is to consider - in what would amount to an act of faith - that the presently dominant notions of unguided naturilistic development will eventually prove sufficiently robust to account for such deficiencies?

Edited September 30, 2005 by Guest

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

I might be misunderstanding the point, but isn't this about falsifiability? ie. that science proceeds on those grounds to build theories, which might collapse (the dreaded paradigm shift) with enough countervailing evidence (unless you work in the pharmaceutical industry)?

Religion - conservative religion, I mean - works along different lines: faith claims there are not open to rejection, without stirring up really divisive forces, which is about the last thing they ever put up with.

There's a guy, Don Weibe, at Trinity College at U of Toronto who's made this whole thing his life's business; he wants all support for the theological colleges there and elsewhere yanked because none of it constitutes anything like science, because none of it is at root potentially falsifiable (there are more complex and problematic issues there that I won't get into, esp. around the kinds of positivism he promotes). I cracked up at a conference one time when he stood up at the end of a paper and demanded in the strongest possible terms that the university institute faculties of leprechaunology, because dammit, people have believed in leprecauns, and their non-existence has been no more established than the non-existence of Jesus.

Clearly, he's not yet been touched by His noodle appendage.

Btw, StoneMtn, I had a good excuse last night - Kaidy Mae's here! Yay!

[d_rawk]

Phorbesie, reading what you quoted, I'm not too sure what I was on about either :crazy:

My point was just that intelligent design can be approached as a neutral topic without explicit references to God (or Spaghetti Monsters). And that both the sides promoting it and fighting against it are overly keen to make it about God/creationism when the topic doesn't actually demand it. The goobleygook was just a rough attempt at how it might be framed in order to accomplish that.

But yes, I need an editor

DEM - well, exactly. Which is why I don't think religion has a role to play in the subject in the context of a (science/biology) classroom. But I don't think it needs to in order to accomodate inquiry into ideas like ID, but we're alienating all the moderate voices by focusing on the extreme ends of the debate. (faith claims in the scientific community are not open to rejection without stirring up really divisive forces either -- countervailing evidence or not)

That's hilarious about Don Weibe. So, what does he think of the Social Sciences or the Humanities?

[edit to add:] you almost got me started on a rant about pharmaceuticals with your clever aside. I showed restraint! *proud beaming smiley*

Edited September 30, 2005 by Guest

[Steve from Cleveland]

I'm taking a class on Pragmatism this semester. It seems as thought some of those people that we've studied might have some insight with respect to this, particluarly Charles S. Pierce, and William James, for those familiar?

They talk a lot about truth/belief/etc. Granted, I am behind on my readings, but I have some essays due on Tues. I will certainly be willing to contribute some more (perhaps) intelligible thoughts on the subject from that perspective at that time...

StoneMtn, DEM, et al.,

Any of you familiar with this pragmatic tradition? (I would assume StoneMtn is somewhat, as MANY legal philosophers considered themselves pragmatists (O.W. Holmes, Rorty, etc.)

Steve

[d_rawk]

This Charles Pierce:

or this Charles Pierce?:

Ok, I'm being silly now. That means bedtime.

[Steve from Cleveland]

Never really seen a picture of Pierce, but I'm assuming it's the latter rather than the former... But you know what they asy about assuming...

[StoneMtn]

Steve:

Of those you've named, the only ones I've read are William James and Rorty (and I must admit I can only remember the names; nothing else). I think it was the focus of my studies for about a week or two at a time early on.

I would have studied that over 10 years ago, and by the time I did my graduate work I was more or less focussed on straight-up jurisprudence guys (Ron Dworkin, Joseph Raz, H.L.A. Hart...)

I can be of no help with your work, and would probably be a hinderance if I offered anything.

[Steve from Cleveland]

Right on... I actually wasn't necessarily looking for help, per se, as much as I was looking for a pragmatist's view on the FSM/Intelligent design discussion. Thought you might be familiar with it, since a lot of it seems to me to be tied into law/jurisprudence, etc. Anyhow, for those who care, I am sure that this discussion and that material is related (As they discuss beliefs/truth/theism, etc) and will post my thoughts once digest some material a little more thoroughly... DEM, any comments/insight?

Steve

[d_rawk]

Steve -

This isn't related so much to this thread, but thought I might give you heads up in case you're interested. I caught the 'season premier' of TVO's Big Ideas today, and it features a 45 minute lecture by Simon Blackburn (who wrote "Truth: A Guide"). He talks a fair bit about Rorty, Wittgenstein, and other pragmatists. It's an excellent lecture and will be replayed tommorow at 1:00pm (EST).

Hmm. Ok, judging by your "Loc" description, you're not only *from* Cleveland, but *in* Cleveland. This is probably irrelevant to you, then. Once again (and why is it always in the afternoons that I find myself saying this?), I guess I've been awake too long, and it is clearly time for bed. Oh well, for anyone in Ontario - or elsewhere if you can get it on cable - it is worth checking out.

G'night(/day).

[c-towns]

This is my Ball Hockey Team

[d_rawk]

hot.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Just caught this in today's news, which, granted, is the CBC website, and they've been on strike long enough to make anything redundant. Sorry if it's redundant.

Lawyers Argue over Use of Intelligent Design Concept in Schools

Funny how, given all the ID supporters' insistence that evolution is indeterminate as a theory, they don't carry that same problem with indeterminacy over into the justification of the war in Iraq. "Truth" is sometimes no stronger than a wink.

[d_rawk]

"It's not a strike!" (d_rawk is momentarily possessed by a locked-out picketer ... but really ... it's not a strike.) Luckily it seems to be over now, anyways.

I've been waffling on whether I should retract my position stated above. I started to, and then changed my mind again. *sigh*. I'd really like to come out swinging against ID, but I just don't see how, in good conscience, that I can.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Meh. Just get them back on the air. I don't even follow sports and I find myself missing Kevin Sylvester's bits on Metro Morning.

I can't help but read ID in the end, from whatever angle, as a kind of crypto-monotheism: you need, eventually, to insert some centralised intelligence into the schema; maybe this could be scretched polytheistically, but the point is still the same. I think Feuerbach was right - this is more a case of people projecting their own human willfulness (and insecurity) into the universe, and calling it God, and then glossing over their own power, which becomes perverse and destructive. Whatever it is, it still ain't science.

In relief, it might similarly be argued that there are other religious worldviews - non-theistic, let's say - where other things are left to be and grow on their own; I'm convinced that at some deep level this kind of way of seeing the world is what rankles conservative theists (i.e. people who by and large, in my experience, have lots of control issues) about evolution.

[StoneMtn]

I've noticed that the Great Deity, the FSM, seems to have resurfaced on the Board these days in various threads.

I thought it might be timely to bump this thread back onto page one for those who may not have been around back in October...

[Calamity Jane]

StoneMtn, you obviously missed this thread from a few days ago, where I spent a whole day playing by myself.....(7 out of 14 posts were mine!)

now I'm just waiting for my FSM prosletizing booty to arrive via CanPost. It's just occurred to me how I can 're-pay' that Peter, Paul & Mary disk (on its way to me as I type, I presume)....with some FSM buttons!

[StoneMtn]

Aaaaah. I see.

I didn't realize that there has been a more-recent posting of the true history of Creation than the thread I started in September.

... and I expect that PP&M disc should be there any time now. It was sent last week.