In 2005, a 24-year-old physics graduate named Bobby Henderson wrote a sarcastic open letter to the Kansas State Board of Education demanding equal classroom time for a creator made of pasta and meatballs. This deep dive explores how that protest against teaching intelligent design exploited the deliberate vagueness of an unnamed designer, went viral with tens of millions of hits and over 60,000 emails, and became The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

We unpack the satirical lore, from a creator who was drinking heavily to pirates as the original prophets and a graph linking global warming to declining pirate numbers, and show how each element targets a real fallacy or theological argument. We then follow Pastafarianism into the real world: the Polk County, Florida school board fight, Niko Alm's three-year battle to wear a colander in  ...