No Shit: Patron Saint of DentistryI am not sorry to have been a Catholic, first of all for the practical reasons. It gave me a certain knowledge of Latin language and of the saints and their stories which not everyone is lucky enough to have. Latin, when I came to study it was easy for me and attractive, too, like an old friend, as for the saints, it is extremely useful to know them and the manner of their matyrdom when you are looking at Italian painting, to know, for instance, that a tooth is the emblem for Saint Apollonia, patron of dentistry, and that Saint Agnes is shown with a lamb, always, and Saint Catherine of Alexandria with a wheel…Having to learn a little theology as an adult in order to understand a poem of Donne or Crashaw is like being taught the Bible as Great Literature in a college humanities course, it does not stick to the ribs.
It’s true, I think, that learning the Bible and other religious lore early on sets you up to have a deeper understanding of all kinds of things, from art to poetry to linguistics. I think my literary analysis skills were honed in my high school Bible classes, where we carefully dissembled every sentence, sought out all kinds of interpretations and learned to understand something in multiple layers. Plus, I’m always the first in my grad school classes to pick up on Biblical references (which are really important in pretty much any text written before 1920).
I’ve been thinking about this stuff in connection with the big Flying Spaghetti Monster uproar. In case you’re not up to date with your flying spaghetti lore, here’s how CNN explains the whole thing:
When some of the world's leading religious scholars gather in San Diego this weekend, pasta will be on the intellectual menu. They'll be talking about a satirical pseudo-deity called the Flying Spaghetti Monster, whose growing pop culture fame gets laughs but also raises serious questions about the essence of religion.
FSM: Don't Mess With Pasta
The appearance of the Flying Spaghetti Monster on the agenda of the American Academy of Religion's annual meeting gives a kind of scholarly imprimatur to a phenomenon that first emerged in 2005, during the debate in Kansas over whether intelligent design should be taught in public school sciences classes.
Supporters of intelligent design hold that the order and complexity of the universe is so great that science alone cannot explain it. The concept's critics see it as faith masquerading as science.
An Oregon State physics graduate named Bobby Henderson stepped into the debate by sending a letter to the Kansas School Board. With tongue in cheek, he purported to speak for 10 million followers of a being called the Flying Spaghetti Monster -- and demanded equal time for their views.
"We have evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. None of us, of course, were around to see it, but we have written accounts of it," Henderson wrote. As for scientific evidence to the contrary, "what our scientist does not realize is that every time he makes a measurement, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage."
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These guys are waging a war against intelligent design, which I fully support (the war against it, not intelligent design itself) but I think they’re missing an opportunity to do some serious iconography. I mean, there should be certain saints that show up only with a certain kind of pasta (rigatoni for some, elbo for another, and angel hair for the highest order of saint).
The thing is, FSM is useful for mocking religious education in a certain way, but at the end of the day FSM doesn’t teach Latin. There are some important skills we get from a religious education, and I think in an honest discussion we own up to that.