> So if you demonstrated through a preponderance of the evidence that the historical figure behind a religion wasn't serious, it would retroactively change its

> So if you demonstrated through a preponderance of the evidence that the historical figure behind a religion wasn't serious, it would retroactively change its status? Possibly, though in practice I think it would be unwise to revoke the status of an already legally recognized religion, especially if it has a large and genuine following. But I would argue that Scientology and the Church of Satan should never have been legally recognized in the first place, precisely because their founders were not sincere. Mormonism I'm not so sure about--your comment seems to imply that it's an established fact that Joseph Smith founded the LDS church in bad faith, but it is not. There's plenty of room for debate on that subject. One could argue that if enough of a religion's adherents are sincere, the religion takes on a "life of its own" independent of its founder's intentions, and should therefore be considered sincere. That argument could be used in favor of Scientology's legitimacy, for example. However, that is clearly not the case with Pastafarianism, so it doesn't apply to this court decision. This is all really quite simple: the difference between a sincere religion and a parody religion is that one is sincere and the other is a parody. Stated another way, any "religion" that exists solely to be a parody of religion is, by definition, not a religion. That is what the Dutch court recognized. The willful blindness to this obvious fact on the part of the FSM crowd is amusing. They're appalled that a court doesn't take their "religion" seriously when they've publicly stated that they don't take it seriously themselves.