No one knows how many Pastafarians there are, but there could be millions. Created as a joke by a 25 year old physics graduate, meant to be a satire of intelligent design, the FSM has catapulted Bobby Henderson into international fame.

In particular, Mr Henderson was taking aim at the concept of Intelligent Design, or ID, which provides a supposedly scientific alternative to the Old Testament belief that God created the world in six days and nights, but which dismisses most of the fossil record as false and which relies on the Earth being far younger than geological evidence shows.

Currently Mr. Henderson is attempting to have his theory of the FSM taught in the class room. By legal means if he has to, and he already has one lawyer ready to do pro-bono work.

Some “Pastafarians” speak of the rapture that they felt when first touched by “His Noodly Appendage” or offer prayers that end with the word “ramen” - as in the Japanese noodle - rather than “amen”. Others may have been drawn by a vision of Heaven that includes a stripper factory and a beer volcano and what its founder calls the church’s “flimsy moral standards”.

In addition, according to the creed of Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, every Friday is a religious holiday, while true believers are urged to dress as pirates because of their founder’s discovery of a causal relationship between global warming and a decline in the number of buccaneers in the past 200 years.

You can’t make this stuff up. Wait a second, yes you can!