MOSCOW — A Russian man has been granted allowance to wear a crocheted colander on his head for his driver’s license photo after he asserted that it was a part of his religion—a satirical movement that is meant to mock Christianity and its beliefs.
Muscovite Andrei Filin became the first person in Russia to wear a colander on their head for their driver’s license photo as he asserted that he must do so because of his membership in the so-called “Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.” Officials originally tried to cut the colander out of the photograph, but Filin argued that it needed to stay.
“Then they started cropping the photo to my ears,” Filin said in comments posted on the organization’s website. “I told them that I needed the colander in the image. This is my religious conviction – that I must wear a colander on the photo of documents. They showed me my passport, insisting that there I did not wear any hat. I answered that at the time I had not yet become a Pastafarian.”
After he obtained his license, he posted a picture on Twitter, Tweeting, “Triumph Pastafarianism in Russia! Ramin, brothers and sisters! The first [license with] a colander in Russia! Great day! # Ramin”
The “Pastafarism” movement began in 2005 when American founder Bobby Henderson sent an open letter to the Kansas Board of Education to express his opposition to its decision to allow the teaching of Intelligent Design as an alternative to evolution, mocking biblical Creation with the concept of a “spaghetti monster.”
“With millions, if not thousands, of devout worshipers, the Church of the FSM is widely considered a legitimate religion, even by its opponents—mostly fundamentalist Christians,” the organization’s largely blasphemous website states, then proceeds to make a crude statement about the Almighty that is sexual in nature.
“If you say Pastafarians must believe in a literal Flying Spaghetti Monster to be True Believers, then you can make a similar argument for Christians,” it later asserts. “There is a lot of outlandish stuff in the Bible that rational Christians choose to ignore. We do the same with our scripture. This is intentional.”
“He boiled for your sins,” states one poster featured on the site. Another features a mockery of John 3:16, making a reference to “Spaghetti 3:16,” and shows a man carrying a cross that reads “Pastafarianism.”
As previously reported, in November, a Massachusetts woman won an appeal to wear a colander on her head for her driver’s license photo as officials said that it would be permitted since the strainer didn’t cover her face. A professing atheist woman in Utah similarly was allowed to wear a colander on her head, asserting that she wanted to make a statement in doing so.
However, a man in Georgia was recently told that the headgear is not acceptable and that “Pastafarian is not actually a religion. Rather, it is a philosophy that mocks religion.”
“DDS (The Department of Driver’s Services) does not view satire or mockery of religion as a religion,” the state wrote in a denial letter.
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