Whitney Avalon calls this song her “very favorite hymn”, but it’s not for the deity you think it is — it’s for the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Some folks love hymns. I mean, they just love them. Hymns are the musical expression of their joyful worship of the deity of their religion, and the traditional songs give folks the confidence that they are in the right place, doing the right thing and honoring the Lord of All Creation.

Exactly which deity to sing the praises of is left up to the participant, thanks to the freedom of religion enjoyed in most forward thinking countries, including the United States.

All of this comes together in Whitney Houston’s tribute to hymns, but this is about as tongue in cheek as it gets. In true Whitney Avalon style, no effort is spared to make the music and the visuals that accompany it as good as they can be.

While you’re watching, keep a lookout for a phantom pair of googly eyes on pasta stalks that lurk in the background.

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

The religion in this case is a fictitious one, a satire of religion called the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Adherents to the religion submit the idea that their notion of a flying spaghetti monster with googly eyes as being the Lord of All There Is is no less valid (and no more provable) than any other, so they’re out to have some fun with it.

Adherents call themselves Pastafarians, and claim — without evidence — that pirates were the first Pastafarians.

The “Flying Spaghetti Monster” was first described in a satirical open letter written by Bobby Henderson in 2005 to protest the Kansas State Board of Education decision to permit teaching intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in public school science classes. In the letter, Henderson demanded equal time in science classrooms for “Flying Spaghetti Monsterism”, alongside intelligent design and evolution. After Henderson published the letter on his website, the Flying Spaghetti Monster rapidly became an Internet phenomenon and a symbol of opposition to the teaching of intelligent design in public schools.

The central Pastafarian creation myth is that an invisible and undetectable Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe after drinking heavily. 

The point of the satirical philosophy is to reinforce the notion of philosopher Bertrand Russel’s teapot theorem, in which he stated that he could not expect anyone to believe his assertion that there is a tiny teapot, too small to be seen, revolving around the sun somewhere between the orbits of Earth and Mars in an elliptical orbit just because he said so. The burden of proof, he maintained, was on the person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, not the person challenging those claims.

Pastafarianism has been used repeatedly to challenge arbitrary laws on free speech and religious freedom since its creation.

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