that is perfect.

Feel free to submit a patch. Though I think its kind of a dumb complaint, and I'm a pretty serious Christian. Make of that what you will.

I'm a bit reluctant to post because topics like this can be quite flammable, but just to get things straight.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster never was an offense, but an argument against substituting a well established, throughoutly observed and constantly developing scientific theory (note that theory is not equal to hypothesis) in scientific education to a thing that's rooted in mythology (and let's be frank, quite transparently in Christian beliefs, so it' not even as universal as it's proponents like to put it) in scientific education. 

Sure the FSM become a meme or just an internet thing that can be used to offend others by unintelligent people, but it's still an argument, maybe constructive mocking, but nothing more. Sure, some people might use FSM as an insult, but some religious people are constantly insulting other beliefs all the same, but these insulters are never the majority or the sane (or intelligent really) members of any group of people whom to be taken seriously.

And note that I'm not arguing for or against any belief system, or for evolution or anything.  I won't even really tell what I'm believing in, since I think this is not really the proper place for these kind of arguments and I sure don't want to perpetuate any argument about religion anywhere.

And from another point of view: why don't you make a similar donation drive for another religion into the game? I think it's better to expand the background and make it more colorful than taking something away in the name of  political correctness. I mean it's just more believable that there will be several major and minor religions in the future, maybe even more than today and judging by the list of churches in my country, people can start a religion that is based on quite strange things and ideas from my point of view, but those things are quite important to them. And so the Church of FSM could evolve into an established institutionalized religion in the same way in the far future. 

I always thought that the Flying Spaghetti Monster was a tongue in cheek reference to some of the seed values some of the planets had in the very early Alpha builds leading to some planets looking like this....

Actually from memory that was one of my earliest experiments gone horribly wrong, before I knew any better. Not that I'd necessarily get it right now, the terrain engine is still a horror. I wonder what I was up to...

Actually Robn, I thought they were kinda cool.

Can I have donation (possibly in tons of flax) requests to the Discordian Erisian society? 😉

I want to help their "Operaton Mindfuck"

I would also like to see invisible flying teapots (as starships with stealth device, obviously)... but that's another story.

(BTW. I completely agree with nozmanjier. I always found the FSM reference in pioneer a nice touch. Better have more variety and many other fictional religions. I would not include "real" religions in game: it would cause many troubles.)

<chortles> In Oolite, we have many such - the Church of the Witchspace Lobster comes to mind.

@walterar - A theist would capitalize the word 'God'.

This is ok? 🙂

I vote to leave it in.

... and please include the Lords of Cobol (yes! with the 'C') ...and Prolog! ...and Fortran! and of many other forgotten languages

And Saint IGNUcius of the Church of Emacs! (even if I'm a VI fanatic)

(No offense... I just wanted to write some silly jokes 😉 )

Leave it, include more religions to increase the noise to blasphemy ratio.

didn't want to start a rite just a personal request.  Fiction works for me, and i really want to spreed word about this game. 

i figured yes there would be people upset because i was lightly insulted, heck if i knew someone good at mods i would have wrote them privetly about it and got it just for myself.

notice my first post, i didn't care if it said donate to the united federation of Atheist or Church of Zeus. so im very tolerant over all.

im also not arguing for or against Christianity, Atheism, Religion or Agnosticism.

not everyone can be made happy but i figure that's what is great about mod and patches. 

some of you act like im out to change your game, im not!  

id didn't write the owners of Pioneer and ask for that nor do i care. the owner may be a Atheist who thought it was smart and had every right as creator of the game to put that in.

i asked for a simple mod and nothing more.

Thank you Walterar for your help and for being a Adult about it all.

i still plan on advertising this game on Facebook and i will show it off to who i can, because it is a amazingly beautiful game.

Don't worry DevinJAM, it's just a subject that everyone has strong feelings on and I don't think you upset anyone nor did you mean too 🙂

My reply was short simply because I don't/didn't want to add to more discussion on the topic but just make my personal preference known.

Feel free to add many other real or imaginary religions.

Personally I always found it (the use of FSM in the game) quite funny since it obviously meant that, despite it's origins, it had become a bona fide religion with worshippers by the year 3200.

A sort of ironic way for it to have gone awry as well as being tongue in cheek 🙂

if i'm right it was dan and little me who introduced the FSM to pioneer, all of us thought it's a good idea.

and yes you can be pretty sure that little me as a "fallen priest" will offense religious ppl. whenever i can.

it was as well me who copied the church from FE2, but it's also me who gives a heck about religion.

and i know for sure that i'm right, ain't i, m. lalande?

and yes/no we should debate about this i feel, it certainly doesn't belongs properly to SSC neither to pioneer, nonetheless it's even a branch of sci-fi, or to say it right social-fiction. for some like me this is not possible to seperate from each.

you see how easy such a "unimportant" thing can break friendship, just because of religion, if we would able just to stand a tiny little bit above that...

not to long ago i lost a comrade in "phase2", the matter was a episode in which you see a gay couple, it was, to clarify this, a original idea of gene roddenberry.

impossible to broadcast in the 60's but it should be possible in 21th century, no?

it seems not!

not only him, many was "disgusted" (what's so disgusting about about that?), even worse, they turned their back to "phase 2", just like him.

producers/artists as well as some fans liked to explain them that ST is mainly about tolerance, no chance, they are petrified in their believe.

you don't have to be a atheist to understand that this behave is wrong and to see where it comes from and where it leads to.

already the fact that religion drives a cotter between human beings is reason enough for me to turn my back on it

(and it was the main reason why i refuted my call as priest).

it's ok, believe in whatever you like, a stone, a god(dess), whatsoever, but we shouldn't go this far to classify ppl by this.

but unfortunately any religion does this and nearly no religion respectively god is as selfish as JHWH.

by all the love in the universe, tell me what's good about that?

hasn't it only helped to suppress and enslave my sisters & brothers?

to grant a few near infinite power?

to blind ppl and keep them "stupid", as if they would be animals?

to fight endlessly just because some didn't believe in the same "stone"?

if there wouldn't have been some "fallen priests" like me, education would be still reserved to aristocracy and cleric

(i fear we slip in to something similar with the actual "monetocracy"- count de money, lol).

in other terms, we still proceed to injure the 10 commitments and are simply unaware of it (and dare to call ourselfs "christ").

because we never asked god if he feels comfortable how we "draw" him and it is in fact forbidden to do anyway by the commitments

(if you understand drawing as a process in mind).

but any religion does this, we create a god and have no idea if it fits his nature (depending on if he exists at all, to me it's hypothetical).

i grant you, if i would have been moses, well i wouldn't have done it a second time, "your'e really not worthy" (humankind in general).

i dont think this is a place to debate, Christianity or Religion and a game is not a place to intentionally insult another persons belief, relationship, or point of view.  its not a place for Theist and Atheist to go and be insulted or have shouting matches our debates with one another.  A game is a place of escape from those things that stress us most.    it is no longer a place of escape if that is taken away.  I can debate a person at a appropriate place and have done so,  but who wants to ruin something good for the sake of Debate and argument?  doesn't that kill the idea of escape?

I feel that what PS66 said is not completely in contrast with what you have just wrote. "Real" religions are often a threat to human relationaships, they often cause divisions instead of communion (this is more frequent in a multicultural society, like our, than in a mono cultural one, in which the same shared religion serves as a "social glue"). It's not only an opinion, but a series of historical documented facts. (BTW, one cannot deny that religions have  done some good to the progress of society. At least, they often consist in a series of moral rules that can be easily undestood or enforced to everyone. Sometimes there are problems with updates and service packs... but that's another story 🙂 )

IMO, that's not the case of the FSM reference, as FSM wasn't meant to mock christianity, but the idea that inteligent design could be science (which doesn't mean that it couldn't be true, but only that it's an hypotesis that doesn't have the the properties required to be considered scientific. ...even psycoanalysis is considered pseudo-science, but that doesn't imply that it doesn't works... you could ask the same to every philosopher of science, and obtain the same answer) and some other logical fallacies (just see the number of pirates / global warming correlation graphs as a parody of a typical fallacy in which the correlation between two variables, doesn't imply causality). It's a reaction to what happened in the education programs of some countries.

A similar example is the famous Bertrand Russell's Teapot, which should not be taken as an insult to religions, but a demonstration of the logical fallacy called "argument from ignorance" (with "ignorance" not as an insult but as "missing the knowledge of a fact") and the importance of the burden of proof. Sometimes, these logical fallacies are used to argumentate some religious beliefs, but the Teapot's analogy is not aimed at truth of religions themselfs, but to the incorrect use of logic when trying to demonstrare the truth of a belief. (Anyway, one could affirm that you don't need logic or proofs to believe, and I'm ok with this... just because, by saying so, you are "playing a different game", by completely changing some of the fundamental premises of the discussion)

Similarly, the FSM analogy is not aimed at religions themselfs, but to an incorrect idea of science that many intelligent-design advocates have.

I understand that even after demonstrating that FSM is not meant as an insult, one could feel being insulted anyway... However, I thought that it was worth trying. 🙂

(...and I hope that all that I wrote was clear, since I'm not speaking in my own language... as you have probably noted  😀 )