Flying Spaghettiti Monster Statue

[Annie]

http://laughingsquid.com/flying-spaghetti-monster-statue-outside-of-tennessee-courthouse/

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0401/p02s01-usju.html?page=1

 

[Gunny]

Give it time. It will offend someone.

 

[Toro]

lol

 

[Shogun]

I think it's phenominally ironic that christian crybabies scream that the sky is falling when any other faith wants to use public space that they seem to think only applies to christians.

fuck yes construct a statue of the FSM if the ten commandments are allowed. The 7 whaters from some other cultish dogma? yup, letem display what they want since we've established that non-christians have every right to claim this nation as christians have.

 

[doeton]

eh sharkjumper?

still fightin da phantoms?

 

[Abelian Sea]

Flying Spaghetti Monster makes me smile, but the second article has a sobering point:

Mr. Phelps is attempting to use the 10th Circuit decision to force the city of Casper, where Mr. Shepard is interred, to erect a Matthew Shepard monument near the Ten Commandments monument in a city park.

The Phelps monument would read: "MATTHEW SHEPARD Entered Hell October 12, 1998, in Defiance of God's Warning 'Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is abomination.' Lev. 18:22."

"Now the city confronts a dilemma," writes Patrick Gillen of the Chicago-based Fidelis Center for Law and Policy, in his brief for the City of Casper. Does the fact that the city has a Ten Commandments monument mean that it must now incorporate Pastor Phelps's monument? he asks.

"The city dreads the answer for reasons any person who values civility can easily understand," Mr. Gillen writes.

Not everyone's expressions of faith are as sagely austere as the Commandments or as peacefully amusing as the FSM. Some are pretty grim, even ugly, and not exactly suited to the theme of civility that one would kind of expect from courthouse decorations.

It seems like you'd have to draw a line somewhere before displaying, say, a Death-to-the-Infidel themed piece donated by the Islamic Jihad, but it seems a little silly to me to ban all monuments from courthouse lawns - they're such natural places for monuments.

My idle wish is that courthouses would take a cue from the Supreme Court's hosue, which sports a frieze of many ancient lawbringers, from Moses to those Roman and Babylonian guys whose names I'm too culturally illiterate to remember. Monuments themed around civilization-crafting legal traditions seem appropriate to me for courthouse adornments. The Ten Commandments, for example, do seem more fitting to me than the FSM; not for religious reasons but for the Commandments' relevance to our legal and civil traditions.

So, if I were elected Dictator for Life, my litmus test for the seemliness of courthouse monuments would be that they speak to legal traditions of civilizations that influenced our system and that they do so in a civil and tasteful manner.

Of course, in our current litocracy we may well have to choose between no monuments and a forest of not-necessarily-relevant-to-the-courthouse monuments. Ah well; at least it will be interesting watching the legal battles along the way.

 

[hjmick]

 

[Shogun]

Thea bove Fred Phelps story is EXACTLY why fucking thumpers in general need to take their religious bullshit back to church and leave the rest of us out of their little good versus evil pulp fiction story.

 

[doeton]

yeah,

it would be so tough to distinguish a message of hate from that of religion.

 

[Toro]

I am offended that a satirical god is displayed on the courthouse!

 

[RetiredGySgt]

I am offended that a satirical god is displayed on the courthouse!

I am offended by the picture of Joseph Smith supposedly meeting the Spaghetti Monster.

 

[midcan5]

Sacrilege I say, sacrilege, let's all the pray the monster smites down those heathens.

 

[Gunny]

I think it's phenominally ironic that christian crybabies scream that the sky is falling when any other faith wants to use public space that they seem to think only applies to christians.

fuck yes construct a statue of the FSM if the ten commandments are allowed. The 7 whaters from some other cultish dogma? yup, letem display what they want since we've established that non-christians have every right to claim this nation as christians have.

The statue of the 10 Commandments was removed.

 

[Kagom]

Oh Pastafarianism, your influence still seeps through to this day!

 

[Diuretic]

Needs parmesan.