The South Bank University Atheist Society in the UK recently stirred controversy with a poster that replaced the image of God in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam with the flying spaghetti monster. The poster was banned for being “religiously offensive,” a charge Jonathan Jones finds preposterous:
The artist has not done anything to God. All that has been altered here is a painting by Michelangelo. OK, for some of us Michelangelo is as godlike as artists get – but that does not make his images sacred. … The first person to parody Michelangelo’s portrait of God was Michelangelo himself. While he was working in the Sistine chapel, standing … on a wooden platform suspended just under the ceiling, he wrote a poem lamenting his lot. He complains about the paint dripping down on his upturned face and beard, about having to twist his body monstrously as he reaches up all day and night. By the manuscript poem, he added a cartoon. A naked artist stretches up to paint God on the ceiling – but God is a crude graffito, an absurd caricature with long spiky hair. Not a million miles from the Spaghetti Monster, in fact.
In other words, Michelangelo did not think there was anything inherently sacred about his image: it was a picture of God made by a man; it was not a holy relic. Later in his life, he was attacked for this. Michelangelo, complained pious critics, put art before God.
On Wednesday, the student union at London South Bank University issued a statement apologizing for the censorship:
We have apologised to the Atheist Society for the actions taken and the distress that it has caused. From a Union perspective the ‘Flying Spaghetti Monster’ Poster has not been banned and we have agreed with the Atheist Society to reprint these posters and distribute them on campus for them. They will also be displayed inside the Union’s locked poster boards in order to prevent them being taken down by other students. … We remind students that the appropriate response to opinions they may find offensive is to engage in healthy debate respecting the rights of others to hold views or beliefs differing from their own.
Terry Firma is relieved by the apology, but Tom Bailey sees the poster ban as part of a broader trend:
While bans and acts of censorship on the grounds of religious offence are not justified, they are based on the idea that if something is offensive – actually or potentially – to certain segments of the student population, then it can rightfully be banned. Bans, whether on the basis of religion or sexism, are based on intolerance, an intolerance of certain things that some people may find objectionable, distasteful, uncouth or offensive, and which in turn compels them to be censored – whether it is Robin Thicke’s lewd lyrics or Photoshopped frescos.
Yet the faith-bashing warriors who raged against the censoring of t-shirts at the [London School of Economics] and the censoring of a poster at South Bank University will, for the most part, have little to say about the wider culture of bans and censorship at universities. The banning of the spaghetti-monster poster at South Bank is not a creeping resurgence of intolerant religion or a capitulation to Christian complainers by university officials. Rather, it is part of an increasingly intolerant climate at universities in which offence, religion-based or otherwise, is deemed a legitimate ground for something to be banned.
Previous Dish on the FSM here, here, and here.
(Image of offending poster via Facebook)
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