On the one hand, they are pretty clearly designed with the specific intent of getting the legal protections of being a religion. And their campaigns are designed primarily as reactions to other group's (mostly Christian) exercise of religion in places where the Temple feels are inappropriate.

I'm pretty sure that one of their tenents, "One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone" was designed specifically to help their legal case for their pro abortion campaign.

On the other hand, you would be hard pressed to argue that the member do not, generally, believe in the tenets of the Temple.

I think the bigger issue is that we started with the notion that governments should not discriminate against religions, or give preferential treatment to any one religion. But over time, that has grown into the notion that religions should be granted extra rights. Long term, I think the only solution is to expand the rights we give to religions to everyone. Anything else is discrimination against the non religious.

Returning to the case at hand:

>adherents of actual religions genuinely believe in their tenets

How do you define tenets?

One could argue that the tenets of Pastafarianism is empirisism, a philisophy on how to view truth in the universe. To that end, the flying spaghetti monster is a parable, not meant to be taken literally. This is no different from the large number of Christians who would say that stories in the Bible are parables meant to teach us, and not true stories meant to be taken literally.

I think this is key. The intent of the Church of Satan and Pastafarianism is to make a statement about other religions. They're a form of social commentary. Agree with them or not, that is not what a religion is.

More importantly, we do not have a clear standarn on what qualifies as a "religion". And for, I think obvious reasons, that is a line we don't really want to draw.

Even if we do draw that line, do we really want to deny people their rights to deeply held convictions just because those convuctions are not part of a "religion". Is that not religous discrimanation against the non religious?

Some standard does and must exist, even if it's not clearly defined. Sincerity of belief is a reasonable benchmark, I think, since religions are systems of belief. Otherwise, nearly any set of axioms can be considered a religion, and if everything is a religion, nothing is.

So if you demonstrated through a preponderance of the evidence that the historical figure behind a religion wasn't serious, it would retroactively change its status?

Consider: - L. Ron Hubbard - Joseph Smith - Anton LaVey

Do empirical facts about these founders really affect whether they started religions?

Possibly, though in practice I think it would be unwise to revoke the status of an already legally recognized religion, especially if it has a large and genuine following. But I would argue that Scientology and the Church of Satan should never have been legally recognized in the first place, precisely because their founders were not sincere.

Mormonism I'm not so sure about--your comment seems to imply that it's an established fact that Joseph Smith founded the LDS church in bad faith, but it is not. There's plenty of room for debate on that subject.

One could argue that if enough of a religion's adherents are sincere, the religion takes on a "life of its own" independent of its founder's intentions, and should therefore be considered sincere. That argument could be used in favor of Scientology's legitimacy, for example. However, that is clearly not the case with Pastafarianism, so it doesn't apply to this court decision.

This is all really quite simple: the difference between a sincere religion and a parody religion is that one is sincere and the other is a parody. Stated another way, any "religion" that exists solely to be a parody of religion is, by definition, not a religion. That is what the Dutch court recognized. The willful blindness to this obvious fact on the part of the FSM crowd is amusing. They're appalled that a court doesn't take their "religion" seriously when they've publicly stated that they don't take it seriously themselves.

No, those were just examples where the question is potentially debatable, because enough is known about the founder to have a meaningful conversation. By comparison, you can't really debate Christianity the same way, because if it was founded by Jesus, not enough is known about him, and if it wasn't, not enough is known about whoever was responsible.

"One could argue that if enough of a religion's adherents are sincere..."

But you were, I thought, not considering that to be determinative.

I refined my definition somewhat because Scientology is an edge case I hadn't fully considered. So my previous statement about Pastafarians is incorrect--if enough of them held genuine belief, then it might be said that their faith had taken on a sincerity independent of the founders' intent, and their religion might then be considered valid. Of course, that hasn't happened and it's hard to imagine it ever happening given the deliberately farcical nature of their deity.

Frankly, religion has Western courts and other institutions in a tizzy. It seems everything established after The Protestant Revolution has to pass a higher bar, probably to discourage undesired behavior masquerading as "freedom of religion."

If traditional religions have the right to do so why don't I, or my group of friends?

But on the whole I would say that Pastafarianism is more of a question than an answer? Well it is an answer in that it tells us we can believe whatever we want and the society seems to have accepted that notion