Wednesday, August 7, 2013

A victory for religious freedom

[Originally posted at NOW]

Novy's passionate devotion to his faith in the Flying Spaghetti Monster is an inspiration to us all (Source: dailymail.co.uk)
So woeful has become the lot of believers in the world’s many great faiths in recent years – what with the incessant menace emanating on all fronts from militant atheism and intolerant rationalism – that the rare occasions on which a small measure of slack is cut for a religious community are always worth celebrating.

The latest act of successful resistance against the oppressive secularist machine took place this weekend in the Czech Republic, where Lukáš Nový won the right to wear a plastic pasta strainer on his head in his official government ID card photo, as per the teachings of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, of which he is a devotee. Government officials rightly ruled that to prevent him from practicing his faith in this way would constitute a violation of the country’s religious equality laws.

This is now the second time that the long-beleaguered Pastafarian community (as Flying Spaghetti Monster worshippers are also known) has made such a breakthrough, the first being the case of Austrian citizen Niko Alm, who successfully earned the right to wear his spaghetti sieve in his driving license photo in 2011.

One can only hope these small gains will pave the way for wider acceptance of Pastafarianism, whose claim that the Universe was created by a beer-drinking deity composed of spaghetti and meatballs has every bit as much supporting evidence as the alternative Creation accounts of more established religions.

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