Religious Rights for Church of Flying Spaghetti Monster

This story has been all over the news lately, but it is not true this way.
Yes, he wears a colander on his drivers license photo, but the permission to do so has nothing to do with being a religious headgear.
The rules only say that your face has to be fully visible, so that you can be identified without any problems. You probably could wear a flowerpot on your head, if that's what you wanted, as long as your face is recognisable.

Like crux said - Wasn't this called a hoax?

Did you know that Rastafarianism spawned out of the European exploitation of Jamaica and Ethiopia? Ethiopia was the only country that had a coffee trade up to the time when Europeans smuggled beans out and crippled Ethiopia's economy. Jamaicans felt a similar "downpression" (a Rastafarian word meaning 'oppression') and sympathized with Ethiopian leader Haile Selassie. Rastas claim they are the real children of Israel and that their rightful and holy homeland is "Zion" (Africa, especially Ethiopia).

This schism between Jamaican and Ehtiopian descendents and "Babylon" will not be resolved by poking fun at them. All such gestures merely signal a greater unwillingness to empathize with them, and therefor more of "Babylon". It will just be seen as the flippant, self-absorbed, racionation "Babylon" has been engaged in since Nimrod.

Again, neatorama has dropped the ball by not doing research on something that's been floating around the internet long enough to make these kind of mistakes inexcusable. What happened here? It used to be very reliable. The same thing happened with the lightbulb law the other day.

Hilarious!

Ryan s.
They aren't talking about "Rastafarianism" They are talking about "PASTAfarianism" with a P. Pasta as in SPAGHETTI As in FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER. Lighten up, man.

@crux: nope, it's not allowed to have ones photo taken with headgear for a drivers licence, at least in austria. they even ordered the guy to get a psych evaluation because of this picture. in an interview, niko alm himself called this foto a protest against religious privileges and demands the same right, to wear ridicolous hats in official pictures.

@Biffo

It is a satirical jab at Rastafarianism. All FSM works out to be is a myopic picking on religion. In reality, there is nothing about FSM that reflects religious teachings. God is said to be infinite and formless, not finite and formed. God could not be spaghetti, a man or anything else because God is said to be formless. In Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica he writes: Perhaps not everyone who hears this word "God" understands it to signify something than which nothing greater can be thought, seeing that some have believed God to be a body. Yet, granted that everyone understands that by this word "God" is signified something than which nothing greater can be thought, nevertheless, it does not therefore follow that he understands that what the word signifies exists actually, but only that it exists mentally. Nor can it be argued that it actually exists, unless it be admitted that there actually exists something than which nothing greater can be thought; and this precisely is not admitted by those who hold that God does not exist.

No, sorry Thomas; people who do not believe in God are actually people who don't put in the time or effort to understand what you are even talking about. They are people who misinterpret what you are saying and believe God to be a body and so satirically parody it by conceiving of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as if it somehow paralleled your views on God.