{"id":5982,"date":"2013-09-28T21:37:21","date_gmt":"2013-09-29T03:37:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5982"},"modified":"2013-09-28T21:37:21","modified_gmt":"2013-09-29T03:37:21","slug":"a-pastafarian-prophet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5982","title":{"rendered":"A Pastafarian Prophet"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"A<\/a>

A surrealist and a proto-Pastafarian, SE Portland, Oregon.<\/p><\/div>\n

This recent post on Religion Clause <\/em>describes the victorious struggle of a Texas Pastafarian<\/a> for the right to wear the sacred pasta strainer in his driver’s license photograph.<\/a><\/p>\n

It caught my attention because I had just finished editing an article by Joe “Vampires<\/a>” Leycock, “wandering anthropologist of the occult<\/a>,”\u00a0 for the Bulletin for the Study of Religion<\/em>: “Laughing Matters: “Parody Religions” and the Command to Compare<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

In it he mentions the similar struggle of an Austrian man, Nico Alm<\/a>, for the same end. Laycock argues that Alm, like Pastafarianism’s founders, “wanted to demonstrate that religion is a category fundamentally preoccupied with the absurd and to question why Western democracies afford special privileges to religion.”<\/p>\n

But then a memory of years ago trickled up.<\/p>\n

Since this photo predates the founding of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I think that that afternoon my friend and I were merely “preoccupied with the absurd.” Little did I know that I was an unheralded prophet of Pastafarianism.<\/p>\n

The bare-chested fellow in the Greek fisherman’s cap is, in fact, Greek \u2014 my housemate Yioryos Chouliaras. He seemed to live on Turkish coffee (that’s what he called it) and strong cigarettes and wrote surrealist poetry by the yard. The last I heard, he was the cultural attache at the Greek embassy in Ottawa. Sounds like tough duty, but I am sure that Yioryos could handle it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This recent post on Religion Clause describes the victorious struggle of a Texas Pastafarian for the right to wear the sacred pasta strainer in his driver’s license photograph. It caught my attention because I had just finished editing an article by Joe “Vampires” Leycock, “wandering anthropologist of the occult,”\u00a0 for the Bulletin for the Study […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10,223],"class_list":["post-5982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-american-religion","tag-oregon"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-1yu","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1214,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1214","url_meta":{"origin":5982,"position":0},"title":"Did a ‘Pagan’ Bury the Staffordshire Hoard?","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 25, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"The \"Staffordshire Hoard\" is a cache of 7th-century Anglo-Saxon sword jewels and other items recently found in England (and a great boost for metal-detector sales, no doubt).The caption on one slide of the golden hoard suggests that because a gold cross was folded in on itself before burial, the person\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"archaeology\"","block_context":{"text":"archaeology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=archaeology"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":634,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=634","url_meta":{"origin":5982,"position":1},"title":"A fine italic handAfter thirty\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 15, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"A fine italic handAfter thirty years, the idea of teaching schoolchildren to use a type of italic handwriting instead of (ugh) this seems to have migrated eastward across the Rockies.Coloradans mainly have the late Reed College art professor Lloyd Reynolds and other Oregon calligraphers to thank. But the really thankful\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":340,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=340","url_meta":{"origin":5982,"position":2},"title":"It's all about birds Things\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 26, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"It's all about birds Things found while Web-surfing. Snopes.com debunks the story that the song \"The Twelve Days of Christmas\" contains hidden references to Christian doctrine, adding that the \"five golden rings\" are ring-necked pheasants. If true, that would establish an earliest date for the song: when were those birds\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5455,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5455","url_meta":{"origin":5982,"position":3},"title":"Science Cannot Explain Me . . .","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 18, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":". . . or any other left-handed person. Are we \"damaged\"? Genetically different? Who knows? When I was a student at Reed College, we often fled south to San Francisco at spring break or other times, \"itching to get away from Portland, Oregon.\" And one day five Reedies squeezed into\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"California\"","block_context":{"text":"California","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=california"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/insidescoopsf.sfgate.com\/files\/2012\/04\/Outside_Building-450x600.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":87,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=87","url_meta":{"origin":5982,"position":4},"title":"Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 18, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"Blogging will slow down until the week after Christmas while Mary and I get on the train for Philadelphia and New York. According to Leslie Miller, who covers transportation for the Washington Post, on Wednessday the 17th, the Federal Railroad Administration \"is trying to give communities that want to silence\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"travel\"","block_context":{"text":"travel","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=travel"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11887,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=11887","url_meta":{"origin":5982,"position":5},"title":"Why Is the Hippo Goddess Holding a Bull by a Chain in the Northern Sky?","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 21, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"This carving comes from a Greco-Roman-era Egyptian temple in Esna,where decorated walls are being carefully cleaned and original colors seen again. 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