Dutch court bans colanders in Pastafarians’ ID photos

Mienke de Wilde doesn’t leave home without a colander on her head. She wears it to class like a hat. It covers the top of her hair in the supermarket. If you were looking for her in the crowd at a recent Guns N’ Roses concert, she was the one wearing a pasta strainer with pride. She even wore it on a visit to the Vatican.

So it shouldn’t be all that surprising that she also expects to be able to wear it in her license and passport pictures.

De Wilde, 32, is a Dutch law student who subscribes to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or “Pastafarianism.” But last week, the Netherlands’ Council of State determined that her belief system doesn’t count as religion and thus rejected her request to keep the pasta strainer on her head in her government ID photos.

“At first, of course, I thought just like everybody else: Who are these jokers?” she told The Washington Post on Friday. But she also said she thinks “people fear what they don’t know.”

And to be fair, many people don’t know about Pastafarianism. The group’s website says it “came into the mainstream” in 2005, when Bobby Henderson, an American, wrote an open letter to the Kansas school board, claiming that if creationism could be taught in schools, then Flying Spaghetti Monsterism should be too.

“I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster,” the letter said. “It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel.”

It might sound like a joke, but the group insists it isn’t. Well, at least not entirely. Its website states that some members believe in a literal spaghetti monster, and others don’t at all. Some also believe that pirates “were the original Pastafarians and that they were peaceful explorers.” Those who pray may end their prayers with “R’amen,” instead of “Amen,” giving a shout-out to the delicious noodle dish.

“We are not anti-religion, we are anti-crazy nonsense done in the name of religion,” the group’s website says.

So what exactly do Pastafarians believe?

“The (serious religious!) moral is not to take your own opinion too serious, because extreme seriousness in religion is dangerous and makes violent fundamentalists of people,” de Wilde wrote to The Washington Post, adding that the worst kind of war they would want to see is a food fight.