September 19th was recognized by BlueNC.com as International Talk Like a Pirate Day. I was reminded this past weekend that this day is profoundly important to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

This is important for a number of reasons, but for Pastafarians it provides a convenient source of pirate-behavior data to substantiate the Pirates Vs. Temperature correlation which serves as a keystone of our religion. We expect to see a considerable drop in temperature worldwide on Tuesday the 19th, due to the widespread pirate activity taking place.

In the Pastafarian belief system pirates are "absolute divine beings". Pirates are important to Flying Spaghetti Monsterism because they illustrate that "correlation does not equal causation".

The Wikipedia entry on the Flying Spaghetti Monster states that:

The Flying Spaghetti Monster is a deity of a parody religion founded in 2005 by physics graduate, Bobby Henderson as a protest to the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to require the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to biological evolution. In an open letter on his website, Henderson professes belief in a supernatural Creator entity that resembles spaghetti and meatballs called the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and calls for Pastafarianism to be taught in science classrooms, essentially invoking a reductio ad absurdum argument against the teaching of intelligent design.

In his letter to the Kansas Board of Education Henderson calls for:

One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.

Henderson proposes that Pastafarianism has as much validity as other faith-based explanations of human existence and should be given equal time where Intelligent Design is taught. The Pastafarian Gospel contains The Eight I'd Really Rather You Didn'ts, the Pastafarian equivalent of the Ten Commandments.