The Flying Sphaghetti Monster is not the stuff of this forum but had to blog about it because the three men pictured, besides being kind of cute, are graduate students in the Religion Department at the state university where I slave away. Their panel discussion at the American Academy of Religion's annual conference on the Flying Spaghetti Monster caused a bit of an stir in the blogorama, and got the department and UF on the cultural map of mainstream media. I found out about this at Tuesday's REL4936 class where the instructor filled us in a little on what's happened since the conference. I also found out from the old man that it also apparently got these three men a ton of hate mail, so much so that they've had to have their email addresses removed from the campus directory.C'mon people! Are we so threatened by the Flying Spaghetti Monster that we'd harass and verbally attack scholars who are real people and not some faceless, amorphous enemy? They only want to study FSM's implications in the broader context of popular culture and religion. But apparently there are a lot of dunderheads who can't quite wrap their brains around that fact. It was a religion conference not a sci-fi convention for goodness sake -- oh, wait. If the panel discussion had been at a sci-fi convention I probably wouldn't be blogging about this right now because no one would care.
I guess the throngs of hate-filled, anti-anything-but-my-faith folks are in a lull while waiting for the next same-sex union amendment to come down the pike. Sorry, getting down from my self-righteous soapbox, now.
Took the photo from the CNN piece
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