Holy macaroni – Pastafarians tie the knot

FOLLOWING last year’s decision by the New Zealand government to allow the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster to carry out legal marriages, the world’s first Pastafarian wedding has taken place on a pirate ship in Akaroa.

Briton Toby Rickets and Kiwi Marianna Fenn tied the knot by exchanging rigatoni rings and slurping opposite ends of a length of spaghetti until their lips came together, overseen by official ‘ministeroni’ Karen Martyn.

The bride and groom dressed in full pirate regalia, a central theme in the religion which instructs followers that pirates were peaceful explorers, and that global warming is a phenomenon generated by the decreasing numbers of pirates in modern society.

Fenn also donned the official headdress of the church, a colander.

The couple never previously planned to marry, and voiceover artist Ricketts said: “But when this opportunity came along we thought it would be a fun tool to examine religion, and traditions and practices which are too often taken as a given, as the only way to get married.”

The movement was founded in 2005 to satirise religious fundamentalism in the United States, but is now recognised as a legal religious movement in Poland and the Netherlands, as well as New Zealand.

It preaches that a floating aggregation of spaghetti and meatballs, the flying spaghetti monster, created the universe “after drinking heavily,” and that its only dogma is “the rejection of dogma.”

In the Pastafarian afterlife, Heaven features a beer volcano and stripper (or sometimes prostitute) factory, while Hell is similar but the beer is stale and the strippers have sexually transmitted diseases.