World's first Pastafarian wedding takes place in New Zealand | Hacker News Reader

World's first Pastafarian wedding takes place in New Zealand

theguardian.com

62 pointstim33334 comments

Pastafarianism is a great non-violent method of highlighting the privileged position of organised religions worldwide. When a nation decides that church and state should be separate, and no religion is promoted over any other, you usually end up with a handful of religions with privileges (e.g., tax exemption, access to civilian private records, etc.) that no other organisation can attain. When another religion gains popularity, they too claim these privileges (which is only just, as there is no state sanctioned religion).

This creates a neat conundrum for the lawmaker; what is a religion? When is an organisation a church? Can you legally define what a religion is?

Why is the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster obviously satire, and Catholicism a proper religion? What about Scientology? Is it about the number of adherents? Something tangible? A short-list of pre-approved religions? Pre-approved by whom? On what legal basis?

If you follow this line of reasoning to the extreme, you must conclude that a satirical organised religion is just as much a real religion as any other. Which is fine, but it implies that have to provide the same (legacy) privileges to all, or accept not being a secular state (and rewrite your constitution as a consequence).

Pastafarianism is all about proving this inherent silliness afforded to established religions.

Religions make some kind of honest claim on metaphysical Truth. Satire is at odds with that.

The clever thing is that getting the government to pick winners here is actually worse than letting someone wear a colander in his ID photo. This doesn't undermine organized religion as much as it demonstrates the limitations of liberal government.

I'm not sure that's a win for anyone.

More and more I'm starting to think that intentions don't/shouldn't matter. If someone's asking for special treatment or their own laws, does it really matter whether the reason for it is sincere belief or not?

If governments are eventually forced to abandon the special privileges afforded by law to religions because of satirical mock-religions, then I think the country as a whole benefits.

The question pastafarianism poses though, is how can you differentiate between satire and 'the real thing'? What if pastafarians claim that, yes, it started out as a joke, but now we really believe in His Noodly Appendage? As a normal citizen it isn't hard to conclude that 'obviously', this is satire, but law must not be based on what we feel is satire or religion, it has to be objective.

Apparently some people argue that the absurdity of these religions can itself lead to a spiritual experience:

"Several religions that are classified as parody religions have a number of relatively serious followers who embrace the perceived absurdity of these religions as spiritually significant"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parody_religion

> If governments are eventually forced to abandon the special privileges afforded by law to religions because of satirical mock-religions, then I think the country as a whole benefits.

I don't think it's so easy to disentangle freedom of expression and freedom of conscience from what some consider 'special privileges'. Of course, this varies widely by country. Some of the comments here might be talking past each other because everyone has a different idea about what might count as 'special' privileges.

> Religions make some kind of honest claim on metaphysical Truth

There are widely accepted religions which have very dubious claims on that front. I'm not sure therefore that pastafarianism is any less deserving of the status of religion simply for being overtly satire.

I'll intentionally refrain from naming as my aim is not to start a flame war.

Indeed if you look at the history of all of them there's politics in there.

But, they do claim to be spouting truth. Namely that no religion actually knows about the Divine. Sure, it's missing a long list of laws etc, but is that cruft what defines a religion?

I think it demonstrates the advantages of liberal government unless you'd like the blasphemers executed like they try to do to Christians in Pakistan for example.

My country administratively decided pastafarianism is not a church because it was not created "to observe and spread religious faith". Apparently that's the necessary condition to register a church here. On appeal they just issued same decision again.

Then one must ask, could 'Apple' (or any corporation/idea that promotes a 'lifestyle brand') be considered a 'religion'?

Harley Davidson, Amazon, Oracle, Crossfit, Microsoft, Veganism, etc... as 'followers/fanboys' of these by nature 'spread' the idea that their 'way of life' is better than that of their 'competitors'.

How far down the rabbit hole does this go?

All the way! That is the point; religion is a personal matter in secular states. Treating them as anything more than normal organisations is not tenable in the long (long) term, because you cannot legally limit religion to just those you deem pious enough — well, you can, but then you are not a secular state, and in a lot of countries unconstitutional.

It depends on who is doing the considering. If it's the government, then the answer is yes, because there is no good rule book by which to ratify a religion. The better approach is for government to get out of the religion business, revoke all tax exempt statuses, and let people join whatever organizations they wish. There is no way to ratify Catholicism or Islam or Scientology without ratifying CFSM, you simply cannot do it without being intellectually dishonest. The only solution is to ratify no religion.

What's intellectually dishonest about the rule that for something to be considered religion it must have been created "to profess and spread faith"?

Even if you treat FSM most generously purpose of its creation was obviously not that and purpose of largest religions was exactly that.

Does Scientology pass that test? I believe it was created to give its founders and leaders access to a profane amount of other people's money while simultaneously avoiding both taxes and accountability. From there, it's only a short leap to Mormonism, and another step from there to the Catholics, Southern Baptists, and United Methodists.

The intellectual dishonesty comes in when actions observed to be taken by adherents to the religion are ambiguous, and interpreted in one way for a favored religion, while interpreted in another way for an unfavored religion.

Pastafarians wear pasta strainers as hats, with full pirate regalia as vestments. This action is interpreted as mockery of religion. Catholics wear miters and embroidered dresses. This action is interpreted as tradition. Pastafarians end prayers with "ramen". Other religions end theirs with "amen". You can't be any more certain that a Pastafarian truly believes in the flying spaghetti monster than an adherent of an Abrahamic religion truly believes in Jehovah and stories from their holy book. How can you tell? Maybe they're just in it for the social networking one day a week.

The fundamental problem is that religion is not founded on personal beliefs, not rationality, so any rational rule you can devise to separate "serious" religions from "fake" religions will end up harming a genuine adherent to some religion, somewhere. So the only good way to handle it is to allow all religions to self-identify as religions, applying "duck tests" only as necessary to uniformly enforce laws that may apply equally to all religions.

Not sure about this test but there must be some tests it mostly does not pass. It doesn't have status of religion in many countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_status_by_country

Churches also get tax exempt status because, historically at least, churches also do charity work and social work. Non-profit organizations that do work the government would otherwise be doing get tax exempt status, at least in the U.S.

I think you had much easier if you tried to register Church of Apple devoted to observing and spreading religious faith in superior quality of Apple products.

Everybody's aware that pastafarianism is a mock religion and won't believe that you can found church to seriously observe the mock religion.

There are probably some additional requirements you'd have to fulfill but I don't know what are those.

...as is the Church of Scientology, but it is still considered a 'religion' in much of the world.

Religion is about control. Religion is about conformity and forcing people into a narrow view of faith in a specific thing (see the multiple branches of christianity, judaism or islam).

Faith is neither about control, nor conformity. You can have faith in anything, including a corporation, or a physical object or an idea.

I think that the organizations primary aim would be the religion. So any organisaion, corporate or political, or ethical doesn't have that as it's primary aim then it wouldn't be classed as a religion.

Consider the case of a charity, a corporation that donates to charity, a non-profit cooperative and a political lobby group. They all have a cause in mind, but only the charity has charitable works as the primary action.

Why can't I as a Pastafarian have faith in reality rather than improbable documents? Or is it only real religion if the stuff you believe in appears nonsense?

Faith:

1. complete trust or confidence in someone or something.

2. strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.

Item 1 confidence in something, as in being confident reality as we find it is fine? I'm kind of of that faith myself. There may appear bad stuff but who knows: http://www.yogalifestylecoach.com/presentmoment.html

> Why can't I as a Pastafarian have faith in reality rather than improbable documents?

There are a family of philosophical schools in which reality is all there is and the supernatural does not exist (or might as well not exist). Those philosophies are generally protected under freedom of conscience.

The proponents of pastafarianism are trying to score pedantic points; they do not actually want freedom to discuss and celebrate the chirality of the FSM's noodly appendages. They are likely agnostic and/or atheist and should be covered under those belief systems.

That being said, is it worth distorting the legal code even more to distinguish between pastafarianism and actual belief systems? No. It's harmless if you want to have a goofy spaghetti wedding. We definitely don't want the government picking which (actual) belief systems 'count'. That's an unattractive and tyrannical prospect.

No, it's just perpetuating the very damaging mindset of 'everything must be codified and spelled out into tedious detail'. Look, I enjoy taking the mick out of religion as much as the next guy, and there are many cases where current practices wrt government treatment of organisations based on faith or philosophical convictions haven't caught up with modern views of separation of governments. And yes, that 'last mile' of leveling the playing field takes some people to make a case for it; and will cause some social strife etc and that's all to be expected in a free society.

However, basing such 'activism' (for a liberal definition of that word) on pedantic (and frankly, juvenile) definition games is not the way to go about such a thing. All it leads to is the actual manifestation of the (satirical, debunked) 'EU regulations on the sale of cabbage' (x). It's pointless, much like the definition of what constitutes 'pornography', or what warrants moderation (see the articles on that topic today and yesterday).

It's not like "This creates a neat conundrum for the lawmaker; what is a religion? " is a new or even insightful question. It has been asked for thousands of years. It's fine to have people writing theses and books about it, but for pragmatic purposes, it's senseless to demand an 'algorithmic' answer where a precise set of rules allows one to machinistically answer it for every possible case one can throw at it. I've been banging this drum many times on this site, but that's simply not how policy making for diverse groups of humans works, much to the chagrin of many of us here who prefer our human interactions with as low levels of ambiguity as possible (for clarity: yes, I'm saying, in a roundabout manner, "let's try to keep our autistic tendencies in check".)

So no, one "must" not conclude that any religion is as much a religion as others. In the end, it's all just social constructs, and social constructs just do not work the way you claim. Courts across the world have ruled on organizations being 'religions' or not, and while here and there there is a debatable one, it's not as indecidable as you make it out to be. (one of my favorite ones is that of the 'Sisters of Saint Walburga' where the Dutch Supreme Court decided in 1986 that an organization that claimed to be a religion with one of its main rituals being offering live sex shows to paying audience members was, in fact, not a religion but rather a sex club masking its commercial leitmotiv behind a claim of religion. Shocker!)

Anyway, TL/DR: Pedanticism bad, common sense good - 'pastafarianism' long in the tooth, let's not encourage anything that gives us even more rules and laws and regulations, it's bad enough as it is with anti-social assholes exploiting corner cases (and that goes for all sides).

(x)

    Pythagorean theorem: 24 words
    The Lord's Prayer: 66 words
    Archimedes' Principle: 67 words
    The Ten Commandments: 179 words
    The Gettysburg Address: 286 words
    The Declaration of Independence: 1,300 words
    The European Commissions regulations on the sale of cabbage: 26,911 words

(edit: formatting)

That last one is a myth, though: http://www.snopes.com/language/document/cabbage.asp

Yes, that's why I wrote '(satirical, debunked)'.

Attempting to precisely define and codify what characterises a 'religion' is neither useful nor a well-defined goal. I think it would be entirely reasonable to, under the law, accept that if someone claims something is their religion then it is. It doesn't matter if they invented it, if they are the only one who believes it, nor if it is obviously satire; treat them all the same because anything else must necessarily be some convoluted and fundamentally broken criteria.

Beyond that, the problem is that religions aren't just social constructs: they are granted special privileges under the laws of most countries. So the end result of this should be erosion and eventual dissolution of those privileges (though retaining the principle of freedom of religion and the designation of religion as a protected class against discrimination).

Because 'Catholicism' is usually embedded deep in a nations history, and flying spaghetti whatever is shit someone decided was funny.

For example the province of Quebec has made a great push to remove religious symbols from many places but you'll still see a lot of catholic symbols everywhere including on/in official buildings because you know.. history/culture.

In other words, Bob is not a Prophet. Bob is the Profit Margin.

Cheers to the Newlyweds. May their pasta bowl never be empty.

I was my understanding that ninjas were also involved, or is that a splinter group?

There appear to be a number of sects with varying positions on the Ninja question. I pray this does not devolve into sectarian Sunni vs Shia style warfare between the Pirate and Ninja faiths. http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Pastafarian_Sects

I fear that it will not stop there. With Pirate and Ninja sects already identified, I must conclude that the Zombie and Robot sects are worshiping in secret.

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