Yesterday the Society of Non-Theists at Purdue University had their annual Pastafarian Preaching. We go out in full pirate regalia preaching the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and hand out flyers to the confused students who run into us. One side of the flyer contains the “Eight I Really Rather You Didn’t“s and the other side explains what the FSM is really about. We want to be a satire of your stereotypical fire and brimstone street preacher to show not only how ridiculous these people look, but that we have the right to criticize religious beliefs, especially if they’re silly or hateful.In a stroke of wonderful luck that proves to me that the Flying Spaghetti Monster does exist, we found out Brother Jed was going to be there the same day as us. Brother Jed is a fairly infamous campus preacher who unites all religious denominations in laughing at him. He also looks exactly like Eugene Levy, which makes it all the more hilarious.We basically caused chaos for poor Brother Jed. We had our own readings from the Gospel while he was reading from the Bible, we held up our silly signs all around his, we giggled at all of the ridiculous things he was saying, we skipped around him singing pirate songs…but most of all, we got a great response from students who were sick of Jed’s nonsense.
We started to get a little bored with his ranting, so we decided to commandeer the Boilermaker Special, to the cheers of the crowd around Brother Jed. The train is Purdue’s mascot, so we have a little train looking car thing that you can get rides on on Fridays. So we climbed aboard and enjoyed our new ship, shouting piratical things at the now even more confused Purdue students.
When we returned Brother Jed was still going strong. Two of the Mormon missionaries approached us and asked what was going on. Oddly enough, they became our allies. We talked about how hateful Brother Jed was and how his method of preaching really didn’t make any sense. As silly as I think Mormonism is, I have to admit that the missionaries on campus are generally nice guys. Much preferred to people like Brother Jed.
Overall, the day was a success. We didn’t have any negative feedback, we handed out thousands of flyers, many people thanked us for what we were doing, we got interviewed by the Exponent for multiple stories, and we made the local tv news. I’m not sure how we could have done much better!
I can’t do the day justice through talking about it, so here’s a video of some of our pirate antics and Brother Jed’s hilarious nonsense.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX-C2xpSpz8&hl=en&fs=1&]
Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day, me harties! Arrrrr!

EDIT: One of our other Pirates has blogged about it too, with more photos and video!