Hollywood's inner Christian

Chris Mooney has a great mini-essay in the American Prospect that takes on the "Frankenstein" myth in movies:

But I'm tired of preachy retreads of the Frankenstein myth, first laid out in Mary Shelley's 19th-century classic and recycled by Hollywood constantly in films from Godsend to Jurassic Park. I'm sick of gross caricatures of mad-scientist megalomaniacs out to accrue for themselves powers reserved only for God. I'm fed up with the insinuation (for it's never an argument, always an insinuation) that there's a taboo against the pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge and that certain technological achievements -- especially those with the potential to affect life itself -- are inherently "unnatural." Or as Victor Frankenstein puts it in Shelley's novel, "Learn … by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow." [LINK]

The Flying Spaghetti Monster is the deity of a parody religion, known as Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, started on the Internet by Bobby Henderson as a parody of the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to allow intelligent design to be taught in science classes alongside evolution. Henderson submitted an open letter to the Kansas Board of Education demanding that Flying Spaghetti Monsterism be given equal time in classrooms along with other religious creation beliefs. The "religion" has since become an Internet phenomenon garnering many followers (sometimes referring to themselves as "Pastafarians") preaching the word of their "noodly master" as the One True Religion. [LINK via Boing Boing]