Converting to Pastafarianism

IF YOU KEEP DIGGING long enough, sifting through the garbage, holding your nose and plugging away, you will eventually come upon a jewel or two. That's the internet, and the search for valuable content, amid all the slick celebrity packaging and assorted corporate nonsense. Suddenly, along comes a news item you can't afford not to blog about. News item; about one hundred russians paraded through the streets of moscow the other day, wearing spaghetti strainers on their heads, and spaghetti strands in their mouths, calling themselves "pastafarians", and proclaiming a new religion, a religion opposed to all religious dogma, the international church of the flying spaghetti monster. I kid you not. Well, they got into big trouble. Russia, which was forcibaly atheist during the soviet communist era, is now full of religion, once again, as it was before communisn, and the christians in russia just did not like the pastafarians, so, they implored the government to stop them, which it promptly did, with violence, arrests, and so forth, rather remindful of the treatment of martin luther king in america, or the jews in hitlerian germany.The soviet style police state seems to have returned to russia,unfortunately. Putin is no champion of freedom or democracy. Obviously, russian orthodox christians have no more sense of humor than american fundamentalists and baptists. This is an international movement, or whatever you want to call it, this ostensible revolt from, protest against, and ridicule of organized religions, possibly in particular christianity and or islam, and their mutually antagonistic, tyrannical, aggressive ways. And yes, you surely guessed it, at least if you are an american; it all started in the united states. How could anything so wacky start anywhere else? You somehow smell a gang of twenty year old college intellectuals... Supposedly there are several thousand pastafarians in russia, and in the U.S. and across europe. Perhaps we are witnessing the birth of a brand new compellingly popular faith, like the ohters, which will sweep across the world.Maybe we'll someday see each other at ravioli church, or a sacred spaghetti sacrament. If nothing else, we are witnessing the ability of some people to laugh at ourselves, and a warning against the destructive potential of strict, unopposed religious dogma, and surely there's nothing wrong with that. Maybe we should all convert to the international church of the flying spaghetti monster, at least, in spirit.