A new fight, or rather the same old fight in a flashier ring with a different announcer, has been brewing recently, this time threatening to take our education system with it.
The evolutionists are in one corner, the intelligent designers are in another, and neither have promised the referee that this will be a clean fight.
As always, both sides have brought up some good points, accompanied by a veritable slew of somewhat less-than-good points.
However, my particular point here is not to pick a side, but merely to bring up a new religion that has sprung up because of, or possibly in spite of, this new fight of the century.
Are you saddened by the rapidly declining number of pirates in the world today (the eye patch and parrot kind, not the Mp3 filching kind that will destroy our music industry nearly as well as the recording companies themselves)?
Do you believe there’s something heavenly in the low price and utter simplicity in Ramen noodles, an experience nearly every college student shares?
Do you believe that the creator of the universe has planted evidence directly leading to conclusions similar to evolution while hiding him or herself from full view to create the concept of faith?
Do you secretly hope that there will be a beer volcano in heaven?
If so, you may be a Pastafarianist, and I urge you to behold in awe and wonder his great noodlyness.
Pastafarians, according to the web site www.venganza.org, believe in a “Flying Spaghetti Monster” as the Creator of all that we gaze upon, with noodles for appendages, and two meatballs for, well, I’m not really sure what they’re for.
Let’s call them armpits for now.
The entire thing is a fake religion propagated by Bobby Henderson, a physics graduate from one of the other OSUs, this one in Oregon.
The idea was to prod the Kansas State Board of Education into accepting Pastafarianism as an alternative to evolution during their recent considerations of intelligent design (or ID, for short), by signifying that there are multiple disparate theories out there, and not just one can be chosen to represent all proponents of ID.
Additionally, this guy, and the followers of this newly chartered belief, apparently wanted to poke some fun at the intelligent design followers themselves.
Fake religions are nothing new; Discordianism is a belief system created in the ‘50s and popularized by the cult classic “The Illuminatus!”
Trilogy worships the Greek goddess Eris, the goddess of chaos and discord (Fnord), while being either a religion described as an elaborate joke, or an elaborate joke disguised as a religion.
I’m not really sure which.
I only bring these up because I’m wondering when the creationists and ID proponents are going to come up with a hilarious and well-thought-out fun-poking of evolution.
The below-the-belt hits need to ramp up before this will get truly entertaining and be worthy of a pay-per-view special.
Meanwhile, according to Jon D. Miller, a political scientist and the Director of the Center for Biomedical Communications at Chicago’s Northwestern University Medical School, has performed studies showing that the scientific knowledge of our populace is far behind the curve.
In fact, according to Miller’s studies, 20 percent of American adults believe that the sun revolves around the Earth. If you fall into this category, please let me know and I’ll let you borrow my third-grade science book to pummel yourself repeatedly in the head with.
Whether you believe in evolution or not, however, we can certainly watch proof of some kind of evolution, that is the continued de-evolution of what we laughingly call education.
Here’s to our future worshipping the sun-god, right alongside his noodlyness.
Originally printed the in the Daily O’CollegianSeptember 2nd, 2005
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