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I've recently been exploring the cult of Pastafarianism. The cult was began by Bobby Henderson, a concerned citizen, as a response to the Kansas School Board's decision to advocate teaching Intelligent Design along with the theory of evolution. For those who haven't been following the debate, a quick definition from wikipedia.org:

Intelligent Design was born out of opposition to the theory of evolution. Its putative main purpose is to investigate whether or not the empirical evidence necessarily implies that life on Earth must have been designed by an intelligent agent or agents. For example, William Dembski, one of ID's leading proponents, has stated that the "fundamental claim" of ID is that "there are natural systems that cannot be adequately explained in terms of undirected natural forces and that exhibit features which in any other circumstance we would attribute to intelligence."

It seems to me that ID is an ok idea to teach in Sunday School, but unrealistic to teach in actual science classes. Intelligent Design's main flaw is in its lack of detail. The theory merely states that some higher power created the universe and all life in it, without explaining what the power was or why there are so many mistakes inherent in nature and living things (humans' knees are very inefficient, breaking relatively often, whales and many other swimming mammals have unnecessary additions to their bone structures, like hips, the earth's climate is unstable, causing an ice age every few thousand years). Bobby Henderson provides a much more entertaining criticism of Intelligent Design here.

If Intelligent Design must be taught in schools, lets at least make the "intelligent designer" interesting. Hence Pastafarianism, the belief that the universe was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and all evidence pointing towards evolution (dinosaur bones, extinct species, observable evolution in virii and other little bugs) were intentionally planted by Him.



In other news, I've been trying out Google's new instant messaging service. It's pretty awesome, like most google stuff. If you haven't gotten an invitation in your email from me, you can follow this link to download it.