Odd beliefs!

I was reading this morning about Pastafarians. 

Back in 2005 somebody wrote a letter to the board of education, in Kansas or some similar place in the USA. He was protesting about the teaching of Intelligent Design, AKA Creationism, in science lesson, alongside or occasionally instead of the theory of evolution. One of his arguments was that there was about as much proof of the hand of God in creation as their was of the hand, or possible the tentacle, of what he called the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Here's a quote: 

"I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; one third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence". 

He published his letter on his website and, as happens so often in social media these days, it went viral. And before you could say pasta sauce, a new religion was born. The Flying Spaghetti Monster is, of course, the creator. Pirates are revered as the original Pastafarians and the decline in numbers of pirates is seen as another consequence of global warming. 

Poland, the Netherlands and New Zealand have legally recognised Pastafarianism as a religion. This month the first Pastafarian wedding took place, in New Zealand, I think, with the happy couple dressed up in pirate costumes and with pasta hoops for wedding rings. At the same time a federal judge in the USA has ruled that it is not a real religion. Oops! 

And there I was, thinking that Scientology was crazy, even though lots of famous people appear to subscribe to it. Tom Cruise is rumoured to be moving to Saint Hill Manor, the UK headquarters of that other fairly recently invented religion, in East Grinstead. Now, from something else I read, that's a place which has the headquarters of a whole lot of cranky religions. I wonder if any atheists live there. 

 Moving away from "religions" in my news browsing, I read something about television sets. A news reporter / commentator was confessing in print to having given in and bought an enormous set, a 65inch screen affair, the kind of thing you have in a home cinema set-up almost. He seemed a little shame-faced about the whole matter. 

His wife, it turns out, works as some kind of design consultant and is not impressed. She declares that the obsessive need to have a huge television set is a "man thing" and has organised things in their house so that the set is hidden by a work of art when not in use. At the push of a button the painting sinks into a recess and the plasma screen is revealed. Now that is certainly the way to do things. 

I'm not at all sure I could find enough stuff I want to watch to merit a huge television screen in one room let alone sets in several rooms of the house! 

The design consultant wife goes on to talk about the rights and wrongs of television sets in different rooms of the house and is particularly opposed to mega-televisions in bedrooms as this contradicts every rule of feng shui. A feng shui consultant backs her up on this, talking about "the electro-magnetic pollution and the disturbance to sleep caused by late-night TV-watching". Well yes, I would agree with that, without any of the feng shui stuff, however. 

Which brings us back into the realm of cranky beliefs.