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Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster Now Can Perform Marriages In New Zealand (stuff.co.nz)
New submitter scrote-ma-hote writes: From stuff.co.nz, news comes that the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is now able to solemnize marriages. The registration was listed in the NZ gazette yesterday. The Registrar-General decided that the Church met the criteria in New Zealand for solemnizing marriages, as per the Marriage Act 1955, namely that the "principal object of the organization was to uphold or promote religious beliefs, philosophical or humanitarian convictions."
The idea was to show that religions are ridiculous, not to join the ranks of the bullshit peddlers.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Nobody wants to take your gas-guzzling SUV from you. Just don't don't come running up my mountain when the waters rise, ok?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's bringing to the public attention that it is ridiculous for government to allow alleged representatives of bearded men in the sky to solemnize marriage.
This use of the FSM meme is spot on, an excellent addition to the list of religious things to be ridiculed, and hopefully eventually eliminated.
THAT is not "marriage" in any normal sense, but it probably is the view of marriage that some secular humanists have
Historically marriage has been about forging alliances and transferring wealth and property. Is that normal? Historically marriages have been polygamous. Is that normal?
And no that is not the view of marriage that secular humanists have. It is the view of secular humanists that marriage be treated as a contract by the government. This is specifically to avoid preferential treatment to some groups (i.e. people of certain religions or sexual preferences) by the government which is supposed to provide equal protection under the law.
If humans are just evolved animals though,
Humans are not *just* evolved animals. We are evolved animals. Just like how evolution is not *just* a theory. Evolution by natural selection is a theory.
then there's really no more reason to have the institution of marriage than there is for any other evolved creatures.
It is not the fact that humans have evolved (at all) that makes us worthy of institutions. It is the fact that we have evolved to the point (unlike any other organism currently on earth) to actually have abstract concepts like institutions.
Whales do a perfectly good job of rearing offspring and hanging out in groups without any form of marriage.
And if whales ever evolved to the point where their culture became advanced enough to create institutions like marriage, then the whales might very well benefit from those institutions.
Traditionally "marriage" presumes that humans are more than just animals, more than mere flash&blood, and in most cultures that there is a God or Gods involved in human existence (depending on the religion). As such, marriage is a binding agreement to stay together through thick and thin, in situations where normal contract law would happily support dissolution, with a reliance on, and an additional commitment to, some God/Gods. The fact that so many have in recent years succeeded in making modern marriage so cheap and easily undone that it now differs little from a secular legal commercial contract is very sad, and says more about those who have done this than about the institution itself. Now people walk out of marriages more easily than out of any other legal contract. Things like "no-fault divorce" were promoted as wonderful new "reforms" that would make people happier, but when I look around today I see very few people who are happily married after many decades where that was once the norm.
It's paragraphs like this that philosophy students use as homework problems to find logical fallacies.
This "legacy religion" brought you everything you understand as "civilization". Are you a rebellious teenager trying to get back at your parents by being an edgy atheist on the internet?
Traditionally "marriage" presumes that humans are more than just animals,
Traditionally, marriage has many purposes but despite a very long interest in all things culture and society, this is the first time I've read that one of its purposes was to highlight how we are different from animals.
Marriages primary purpose in most cultures is to remove the participants from the dating market, thus reducing competition and increasing the amount of peaceful cooperation within the society. That is why marriage is by necessity a public, i.e. social, and not a private contract. That is why most cultures have some kind of indicator for married vs. unmarried people (in western culture, marriage rings).
The previously high barriers to getting out of a marriage are due to the secondary purposes in western culture, where marriage is also an economic union. The fact that divorce is still heavily tilted against the husband is due to the ancient assumption that the woman gives up something she can't get back that will reduce her future value to future husbands (i.e. her virginity), so the husband should be prevented from divorcing her unless he can compensate for the difference.
As the economic imbalance between men and women is more and more reduced, so it becomes more easy to get out of a bad marriage.
when I look around today I see very few people who are happily married after many decades where that was once the norm.
Was it, or was it an image projected into a society expecting such? And if it is, are you sure the causality you outline is the correct one? There are many more reasons why it might be more difficult to have a happy long-term relationship today than it used to, the primary reason is probably that you have so much more comparisons than you used to, and some of them are artificially created and appear unnaturally good. Against what you see in movies, your wife can only fail. Not because she is bad, but because that image is a fake.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
While parody of free speech is just more free speech, parody of religion is not itself a religion. Unless you're a dipshit, which many self-proclaimed FSM adherents seem to be.
Ironically enough this season, "Jedi" as a religion probably actually has more legitimacy than "Pastafarian" does. If you're the type of person who puts Jedi on a census form or attempts to speak the Klingon language to another person, you're probably the (nerdy enough) type of person who attempts to adopt that as a bona-fide moral philosophy, or who puts in the effort to use a defined grammar to attempt to convey an idea. Although they started as fictional concepts, they are both legitimate examples of what they'd purport to be.
On the other hand, FSM adherents don't *actually* believe in a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Could they say so under oath? No, you couldn't. Sad they can't distinguish between ironic parody and real life, they're just being assholes trying to (as someone put it earlier) "sit in a clown suit next to people that don't think they're wearing something ridiculous".
Yes, you might have a right to wear Google Glass with a prescription lenses generally, but suing establishments to try to force them to allow you into a movie theater or other sensitive place on those grounds just makes you a complete douchebag.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,