The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (13 page)

Known as the original Renaissance Man, Leonardo Da Vinci came from humble origins. His father was a notary and his mother was a local peasant woman. Leonardo was raised on the hard streets of Florence where he grew up quickly—learning to draw, paint, sculpt, and invent before normal kids his age had ever even
seen
a gun. He was also a closeted homosexual.
³

Da Vinci began keeping journals early in life. He wrote them in code, but his cowriter, Dan Brown, later translated much of what was inside. Through Da Vinci’s journals, as well as surviving records kept by Florence’s Officers of the Night, an antisodomy agency of the time,
⁴
we have learned that Da Vinci enjoyed the company of adolescent boys and that he “liked ’em young.” He also became a vegan,
⁵
having determined that milk-producing udders are homologous to a woman’s breasts, which of course he despised. But enough about his sexual preferences.

Throughout Da Vinci’s life, he managed to invent everything that’s
ever been used in a war. These include the helicopter, the hang glider, the tank, the machine gun, the cluster bomb, the robot, and the submarine. Later he went on to invent the single-span bridge, the video game Halo, and the gate that swings both ways.

The Renaissance humanists saw no distinction between science and the arts, and so Da Vinci didn’t limit his brilliant imagination to just inventing things.
⁶
He also painted such famous masterpieces as the
Adoration of the Magi
, the
Mona Lisa
, and
The Last Supper
. He studied anatomy, designed festivals, sculpted, and wrote music. He even arranged it so that his shit didn’t stink. In short, he was awesome.

(We will not cover Da Vinci’s problems with the Catholic Church, since everybody has already read
The Da Vinci Code.
)
⁷

Originally born with the name Filippo in 1548, Giordano Bruno took his new name in 1565 when he became a Dominican friar at the Monastery of Saint Domenico near Naples. Eventually he was ordained a priest, which is slightly ironic considering what the Church eventually did to him. But more on that later.

Disliked by all who encountered him, Bruno became an avid reader of books. He read Plato, Copernicus, Thomas Aquinas, Averroës, Duns Scotus, Marsilio Ficino, Nicholas of Cusa, Nick Hornby, and Isaac Asimov. It is a well-known fact that those who read books often develop some funny ideas, and history has shown this to be especially true of people from the olden days. Bruno became particularly influenced by his reading of Copernicus and Plato—so much so that he couldn’t stop talking about them. In 1576 the Inquisition put Bruno on their Ten Most Wanted list.

He escaped to Geneva, but this wasn’t the last time the Inquisition would come calling. For a short period, Bruno joined the Calvinists, but he was unwilling to abide by their strict “no smiling” policy. In 1579 he traveled to Toulouse, France, where, for a while, he enjoyed the
protection of powerful French patrons. It was during this period that he completed the majority of his writing, including
De l’infinito universo e mondi
, in which he argued that the stars were the same as our sun, that the universe was infinite, and that all universes were inhabited by intelligent beings, establishing Bruno as the first ever sci-fi geek.

While still in France, Bruno gained fame for his prodigious memory. Although his ability to retain information might have been a direct result of his intensive reading habits, he really should have put down the books at this point and slipped into dispassionate ennui like the rest of the French. Instead, Bruno decided to go to England.

In 1583 he sought a position at Oxford, but the people there judged him to be a know-it-all and Bruno was turned away. After petitioning to teach at a few other English schools, he came to learn the harsh reality of the saying “You only have one chance to make a good first impression.” For the next couple of years, it is believed that Bruno spied against Catholics in England. Posing as a Catholic priest, he purportedly took confessions from Catholics, then reported those confessions to English spymasters who saw to it that the Catholics were put to death under the persecutory laws of the time. Even if Bruno wasn’t a heretic, he most surely had proved himself to be a major asshole by this point—and well-deserving of a good burning.

In 1585 Bruno returned to Paris. Within a year he had pissed off the Parisians, and so he moved to Germany, where his reputation hadn’t preceded him. By 1588 he was on his way to Prague, and it was growing clear that Bruno was running out of countries.

Faced with the option of fleeing to Siberia
⁸
or going back to Italy, Bruno stupidly accepted a brief teaching position at Padua in 1591. Unfortunately for him,
⁹
the professorship he sought there went to Galileo Galilei. So he journeyed to Venice, where he pissed off one last person, who then denounced him to the Inquisition.

Bruno was arrested on May 22, 1592. It took six years before he stood trial in Rome, and when the inquisitor, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, asked him if he still stood by his beliefs, Bruno is believed to have replied: “Does the pope wear a funny hat?”

And so, on February 17, 1600, a nail was driven through his tongue, Bruno was tied to a stake, and he was burned as a heretic.

If only he’d kept his mouth shut.

A tough lesson, for sure.

In June 1837, more than twenty years before Charles Darwin published his famous, if highly flawed, treatise on Natural Selection entitled
On the Origin of Species,
the young biologist self-published a lesser-known work, one that turned out to be his first stab at reconciling his beliefs in science and religion. That book was
On the Origin of Spaghetti Sauce.

Probably mildly retarded, Darwin grew up in Shrewsbury, England, the fifth of six children. He was the son of Robert Darwin, a well-to-do doctor, and Susannah Darwin, who was rumored to be a virtual magician in the kitchen. Throughout Darwin’s life, this family dichotomy would tear at the very fabric of his being, as pressure to excel in the natural sciences collided with his more homey desire to transmogrify the English culinary experience, a mission at which he ultimately failed.

Darwin entered Edinburgh University in 1825 and was immediately astonished to discover that the university did not offer courses in the culinary arts. Tricked by his father into studying medicine, the dejected young Darwin resorted to cooking sumptuous dinners for himself in his boardinghouse. In his second year he joined several student naturalist societies, and for a short time he was free to explore the shores of the Firth of Forth, collecting crustaceans for various culinary wonders, like linguini
with clam sauce and penne with striped zebra mussels. Little did his fellow students
realize
that this “creepy little cook”
¹⁰
would one day use these experiences as a springboard for one of the greatest revolutions in Western contemporary thought.

While still at Edinburgh, Darwin produced his first scientific paper. Presented to the Plinian Society, it explained that the black spores found in oyster shells were the eggs of the common skate leech. Darwin shrewdly concluded that these spores were left by the Flying Spaghetti Monster as a sign that even the lowliest of God’s creatures could band together for a common cause.
¹¹
He was soundly laughed out of the society’s chambers, and shortly thereafter his father arranged to have him transfer from Edinburgh to Cambridge.

Once he got to Cambridge, Darwin’s father threatened to remove young Charles’s colander and other kitchen utensils if he did not bear down and fully commit himself to his studies as a physician. But the young son was adamant that he would follow his dream of culinary excellence. When he finally threatened his father with the prospect of abandoning the family and moving to France, the two Darwins arranged a secretive meeting in Paris’s Saint-Sulpice Church,
¹²
where it was determined that the young Darwin would pursue studies in theology. This seemed a sensible compromise, as clergymen were well paid and as most English naturalists were clergymen. Charles is widely believed to have told his father at the time, “If I cannot be allowed to explore the wonders of God’s cookery, then let me at least explore the wonders of His creation.” Charles Darwin applied himself at Cambridge but was a C minus student at best. In the summer after that first year at Cambridge he was embarrassed by his poor showing and sought any means possible to avoid going home during the break. He read a bunch of pamphlets and ultimately decided to take a Mediterranean cooking cruise, where he was promised the opportunity to explore and sample the various foods of Greece and southern Italy. But the voyage was ill-fated. Darwin suffered from food poisoning and sea sickness, and ultimately he went
home early. The only record of these sad days exists in a poorly penned and unpublished journal that he titled
The Voyage of the Meatball
.

The Voyage of the Meatball
nearly destroyed Darwin. He limped through his last year of studies and, following graduation, did what any man armed with a Cambridge degree would do: He took a five-year vacation to the Galápagos Islands. Suffering from nervous exhaustion—and having lost all faith in humanity—Darwin was now determined to befriend as many of the world’s animals as possible.

It was aboard the HMS
Beagle
that life began to turn around for him. In a freak gale off the coast of Tierra del Fuego, all of Darwin’s cookbooks were washed overboard; bored and suffering from severe skin rashes, young Charles picked up a book that would set his life on a new course. That book was Charles Lyell’s
Principles of Geology
, which posited that geological features are the outcome of gradual processes that take place over eons of time. Something clicked in Darwin’s head, and in that moment of clarity he realized that a slow-cooked sauce would be exponentially more delicious than one that was merely heated from a can, something that had never before occurred to an Englishman. From this realization, he gleaned some other ideas related to Evolution, but he was really most excited about the sauce revelation. Within days, the
Beagle’s
cook was thrown overboard, and Charles Darwin took over the ship’s mess.

There were mussels galore in South America,
¹³
and Darwin thrived. On October 2, 1836, he returned to England as a minor celebrity, having discovered fossils, finches, tortoises, mockingbirds, and modern cooking. His book
The Voyage of the Beagle
¹⁴
was a hit, and he was invited to dinner parties throughout London, where he cooked and talked throughout many a night. Some of the proceeds from the
Beagle
book went toward self-publishing
On the Origin of Spaghetti Sauce
, in which Darwin put forth his theory of slow-cooked sauce and perfectly boiled
noodles as a divine representation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Sadly, the book never took off.

Still, Darwin had his day job, which consisted of little more than jotting down everything he noticed. To that effect, and prompted by the fascinating structural similarities between earthworms and various forms of pasta, he began studying worms.
¹⁵
It is quite possible that this is the point where Charles Darwin finally descended into full-blown dementia. We will, however, never know the full truth, because Thomas Huxley, who had developed an unhealthy fascination for the fullness and length of Darwin’s beard, took it upon himself to follow Darwin around in an attempt to defend his mindless ramblings about worms.

It was Huxley who convinced Darwin to stop arguing that humans were descended from worms—or “in His
¹⁶
image,” as Darwin was often quoted as saying. Huxley convinced his friend to claim that the lines of descent passed instead from
monkeys
, which he pointed out actually
had
appendages and bore an uncanny resemblance to certain people, including Darwin, who became known as “Monkey Man.”