Originally published at: Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster denied legal recognition in Australia | Boing Boing
…
5 Likes
11 Likes
That strains belief.
21 Likes
Isn’t Australia the place where you can declare yourself a Jedi on government forms?
8 Likes
n the ruling, Ms McEvoy noted that while various “Pastafarian texts” are set out in traditional religious forms, they “contain some surprising articulations”
Wait until this vaunted expert gets a load of the “surprising articulations” in the Bible, the Book of Mormon, etc.
17 Likes
So. Many. Forskins.
7 Likes
…such as references to the books of the Bible as the “Old Testicle”
but but that’s the book which specifically speaks to me! (and straightens my path to discover a truly righteous Alfredo sauce)
6 Likes
The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster provides an excellent test of religious freedom. Anytime the American religious right uses the term Religious Freedom, they generally mean the exact opposite of freedom such as freedom to force all fetuses to term or freedom to decide on whether citizens are allowed to live our lives as we choose. Correctly demanding that Pastafarians enjoy the same level of religious liberty that is provided to the religious right appropriately defines First Amendment protections.
16 Likes
I just heard last night from an Aussie that they have no bill of rights. What’s the process - can it be appealed? Is there an entity that oversees the SACAT?
From the linked article:
“It is my view that the Pastafarian texts can only be read as parody or satire , namely, an imitation of work made for comic effect. In my view, its purpose is to satirise or mock established religions, and it does so without discrimination,” she wrote.
Hm. But what of the purpose of the satire?
10 Likes
South Australian Civil and Administrative Tribunal is known for being very refusilli.
They treated this case as a nothing more than a pesto.
9 Likes
TBH, they only gave away free red cups at the beer volcano.
2 Likes
You can declare as Jedi in the US too. If you were in the military you can even have JEDI KNIGHT embossed on your dog tags.
6 Likes
There was a satire book from the 90s: Martha Stewart is Better than you at Entertaining that had a page about throwing a bris party. The entre was little pasta tips sitting in a pool of marinara on a plate. I also loved the burnt-toast coffin cucumber sandwiches for the wake. If the Martha Stewart brand weren’t so heavy handed with the SEO management I could probably find the image…
5 Likes
Someone started spreading rumours that if a certain amount of people wrote in “Jedi” on their census forms, then it’d be declared an official religion. The Bureau of Statistics clarified that they’d just be marked as “not defined”, and there was no threshold for what constituted a religion.
We have no bill of rights, but we do have a constitution, which states that “the Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.” Notably it doesn’t preclude states (and SACAT is a South Australian state tribunal) from writing such laws.
No idea about appealing and oversite.
7 Likes
Thank you for the info
2 Likes
And yet Scientology’s religious status is nailed in place in Australia.
New Zealand is more pasta-friendly.
6 Likes
It began on the UK census which has a religion question. There are a list of major religions followed by ‘Other’ and ‘None’. People started completing the ‘Other’ field as Jedi.
This might have been a confusion from the ‘nationality’ question which had been modified in the past to include more minorities as one of the pre-defined answers - ‘Cornish’ being a recent addition because of intensive lobbying in Cornwall.
The whole Jedi thing was a little controversial because some people who are atheists filled it out as ‘Jedi’ which meant that the actual number of people who are not religious may have been undercounted.
2 Likes
The American Bill of Rights is merely the first ten Amendments to the Constitution.
The Ninth Amendment says, in essence, ‘Just because a right of the People isn’t listed here, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist’.
So, when somebody tries to claim that you have no right to do something ‘Because it’s not in the Constitution’, this means they have it exactly bass-ackwards.
7 Likes
Tomato sauce for the goose…
4 Likes
Were calamari rings involved?
2 Likes
