Religion, Politics and the Great Pumpkin

... are the three things Linus van der Pelt said he'd learnt never to talk about. For those of you who don’t know, Linus is a character from the Peanuts cartoon strip (starring Snoopy) by Charles M. Schultz. Fairly early on in his life, Linus creates his own religion by confusing Halloween and Christmas. He lives his life convinced that if he believes hard enough then the great Pumpkin will appear to him and bring him gifts at Halloween.

I mention this because the subject of this blog is parody religions, and when you type parody religions into wiki, you get a list which includes Linus’ worship of the great pumpkin. Personally I’m not sure it should count as Linus is the only one who ever follows it (though he believes in it with an evangelical fervour) but you can’t argue with Wiki (except that you can, and probably should).

Parody religions are definitely a phenomenon of recent times, and owe their existence largely to the Internet. If a man were to turn up at your house and tell you he worshiped a sentient ball of spaghetti, you’d think he was a loony. But for some reason, if he says it on the Internet, he becomes the founder of one of the fastest growing of the parody religions, Pastafarianism or the Church of the flying Spaghetti monster (more on them in future posts).

But what is Parody religion, I hear you cry? Parody religion as a blanket term covers two distinct phenomenon; those groups which are purely spoofs or parodies of other religions, often trying to highlight the ultimate foolishness of religion, and those groups which are in many way genuine religions, but with a slanted or skewed world view which makes them seem at first to be simply a joke. The prime example of the second type of group is the Church of the Blind Chihuahua, which at first glance seems like a joke, but once you delve deeper, you realise they are making a valid point about the way Christianity is practised. They are not tying to convert people to atheism (which it could be argued groups such as the Pastafarians are doing), they are believers, but their world view is slanted and in most cases humorous.

So why write a blog about them? Yeah those zany Pastafarians are kind of cool with their off-beat humour and their pirate costumes, but aren’t ultimately just being silly? Well in many ways, yes. But they also give rise to some interesting questions, such as why do people do this, haven’t they got better things to do and why don’t they just grow up? I intend to examine these (and many more interesting and serious questions) in the months to come.