Discordianism vs. Pastafarianism & the connection to the Church of the SubGenius

[Juana]

Eh. Vengeza used to be pretty cool, back when Auntie DeDe (a liberal quaker) was running it, in like, late 2006. It's pretty stupid these days, and yeah, the majority of the members are indeed humorless, militant atheists.


The tl;dr guide to Pastafarianism: The flying spaghetti monster made everything (starting with a mountain, a midget, and tree) to parallel the Adam and Eve story. Reduction in the number of pirates correlates with the increase in global warming, and Bobby Henderson, the founder, used this to point out that causation isn't correlation.
The whole point was to say to the Kansas Board of Education that if you're going to use the "teach the controversy" method to teach ID in schools, you gotta include this one, too.

[Cain]

I think we first visited in late 2007 or so.  By that point...not so fun.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

My personal take on FSMism:

It reflects what I hate about current culture and the internet. Here's the difference between a joke and a meme: when the joke stops being funny, you stop telling it. When the meme stops being funny, its more reason to keep fucking telling it. FSMism is a meme now.

Discordia has room for growth, and can stay relevant. Discordia evolves. FSMism is the same with each iteration. As is IPUism.

The other difference, as noted before, is that what Discordia actually is in terms of religion is a bit fuzzy. It depends on the individual Discordian. I'm not an atheist, as are some other people here I imagine, but there are also atheists on this board. Discordia is like Buddhism in that way. If you want to believe in shit, cool, go for it. If you don't cool, go for it. It's not really relevant to the idea itself. However, if you're a Pastafarian, you are an atheist. Or a really big fucking geek.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I agree with Dok Blight. Pastafarians and the Church of Google seem different from Discordianism beneath the mask. Beneath the mask, CoG and FSM followers are atheists. Behind the mask of Discordianism, there are all sorts of strangeness, pagans, athiests, agnostics, magicians, absurdists, nihilists etc. etc and in general most of them are probably some weird crossover that hits bits of those and misses other bits.

CoG and FSM are a single shot joke. "IF there could be a God, there could also be *insert joke here*" Discordianism, on the other hand tends to look at a more broad philosophy. Some of the early Discordians considered themselves the 'anti-bodies' of the neo-pagan movement. Not atheistic "Dumbass there is no god", but rather "Hey, don't forget that some of this might be bullshit". That same view gets applied to politics, religion, science, philosophy and random posts on Internet forums.

CoG and FSM question the plausibility of the Christian view of God. Discordians tend to question the plausibility of almost everyone's view of almost everything.

I think.

[Cain]

I would say the CoG are more similar to Discordianism than FSM, but I would generally agree with that assessment.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Also, in regards to FSMism, they're basically saying the same thing that Carl Sagan did decades ago, and Carl Sagan is way cooler than a Pastafarian any day.

[Telarus]

I agree with the last few posts as well.

As to the Sub Genius, I know a few of the old skool cats here in portland (who refuse to let it be their only shtick), and they're cool dudes.

If you want to get an idea of what a devival is like, here are videos of when the Cyclone of Slack hit PDX (1st 10 videos):

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cyclone+of+slack


It was a good show.

[LMNO]

I shall paraphrase what ECH said a year ago:

"A Discordian is a militant agnostic."

In other words, everyone's beliefs are suspect, including my own.

[East Coast Hustle]

I agree with Dok Blight. Pastafarians and the Church of Google seem different from Discordianism beneath the mask. Beneath the mask, CoG and FSM followers are atheists. Behind the mask of Discordianism, there are all sorts of strangeness, pagans, athiests, agnostics, magicians, absurdists, nihilists etc. etc and in general most of them are probably some weird crossover that hits bits of those and misses other bits.

CoG and FSM are a single shot joke. "IF there could be a God, there could also be *insert joke here*" Discordianism, on the other hand tends to look at a more broad philosophy. Some of the early Discordians considered themselves the 'anti-bodies' of the neo-pagan movement. Not atheistic "Dumbass there is no god", but rather "Hey, don't forget that some of this might be bullshit". That same view gets applied to politics, religion, science, philosophy and random posts on Internet forums.

CoG and FSM question the plausibility of the Christian view of God. Discordians tend to question the plausibility of almost everyone's view of almost everything.

I think.

yeah, totally this.

[Jasper]

It's like Cartesian doubt with a dash of practical realism thrown in.

[LMNO]

Whoa. ECH and Rat reach agreement.



Rat blows it with an obscure Crowley reference in 5... 4...  3...

[BabylonHoruv]

Weren't the CotSG started by a Discordian?

The Book of the SubGenius looks, to me, like what you'd get if you tried to do the Principia with a budget.  And a slightly more coherent sense of humor.

[the last yatto]

Nope, Dobbs stole money from LRH to start the church

[Cain]

Weren't the CotSG started by a Discordian?

The Book of the SubGenius looks, to me, like what you'd get if you tried to do the Principia with a budget.  And a slightly more coherent sense of humor.

Kerry Thornley was involved in the early days of the Church, he even wrote one of the entries for the original Book of the Subgenius.

[Triple Zero]

As far as I understand, Pastafarianism was made by this one guy from vengeanza.org in the form of a pretty brilliant piece of satire on Creationism in schools.

Which then got a load of media attention and it stuck.

Unfortunately, except for that one guy, who I admire for the success of his mindfuck, all the other Pastafarians are basically rehashing teh same old jokes over and over again, creating desktop images of spaghetti monsters and that's about all they do. Plus being (somewhat militant) atheists.

On the other hand, that I think this is definitely also partly fueled by a bit of jealousy, since they're a parody religion just like us, and they're relatively new (since 2005) but significantly more well-known than Discordia. Really a LOT of people I know have via-via heard about the spaghetti monster, it's apparently a real catchy meme, but often they hear about Discordia for the first time from me.

Now of course, the pastafarianism is summed up in

- creationism satire
- spaghetti monster
- pirates VS global warming, LOL

And whenever someone asks me about Discordia, there's like a zillion things I could tell them, all so very different. Plus (and i would like that to be different, somehow, but I dunno how) I can't really send them to PD because PD is so eclectic, it doesn't really "speak for itself", in the sense that if a friend clicks a random thread on PD it can be brilliant, bickering, personal, fluffy, pineal, in-joke, american politics, creative writing of various qualities etc etc but due to the varied topics usually fails to truly draw someone in.



And on SubGenius, I still need to read their stuff. I can't seem to get through it. But there's quite a bunch of good shit in there, and it's definitely related to Discordia in some way or other.