It’s impossible to drive around the midwest and not see the Ichthys on the sides of businesses and the backs of cars, especially Fords and Chevys, usually next the gun rack and the Re-Elect Cheney bumper sticker. And by Ichthys, I mean the so-called Jesus fish:
I’ve always liked the fish as symbol of Christianity, because of its geometric simplicity (a symmetric intersection of two circular arcs) and because I always assumed the fish represented one of the uplifting aspects of the religion, like Jesus’ call to make his apostles “fishers of men,” or the miracle of the fish and loaves.* (In contrast, I’ve always though the crucifix is a ghastly symbol. Out of all the aspects of a faith about everlasting life on which to focus, prophetic-cause-of-death seems like an odd choice.)
* In fact, apparently the seafood symbol was chosen not for the spiritual reasons I’d always assumed, but rather because the phrase Jesus Christ, God’s son and savior, when written in ancient Greek (the language of the New Testament) is Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, Θεοῦ ͑Υιός, Σωτήρ, which if written as an acronym is IΧΘΥΣ… which is the Greek word for fish. So it’s kind of like a theologically blessed version of SCUBA.
When I was in college, I picked up a Darwin Ichthys and slapped it on the back of my Honda Accord. I loved it from a graphic design perspective: it cleverly converted a recognizable symbol often linked with anti-evolutionary thought by modifying it with the addition of some small perfunctory legs into a textbook transitional form illustrating the evolutionary process. Plus it irritated the hell (literally!) out of Bible-thumpers, which was always amusing.
Ever since then, there’s been an influx of Ichthys knock-offs, each promoting a different worldview. For example, for believers in ancient astronauts (that is, that modern man is the result of ancient man learning from extraterrestrial beings), we’ve got the Alien Ichthys:
Believers of the Church of Roddenbury, also known as Trekkies, have the similarly themed Trek Ichthys:
Even goths have a fish:
That’s why I was so greatly amused to see this on the back of a car the other day. Behold the Flying Spaghetti Monster Ichthys:
As the Pastafarians would say, “R’Amen, brother. R’Amen.”
On a complete unrelated note, Saturday was my birthday. For those komplexify readers who belatedly feel guilty about not noticing, an FSM Ichthys would make up for that quite excellently.
On a tangentially related note, I’ve never quite understood the Christian response to the Darwin Ichthys, which usually runs as some variant of this:
My difficulty is two-fold. First, while I suppose the point is to show that TRUTH will triumph over DARWIN, wouldn’t that have been better displayed by, say, having the Truth Fish overshadowing the Darwin fish, or smacking about the Darwin fish, or crushing the Darwin fish, or in fact pretty much anything besides eating the Darwin fish? Because having TRUTH eat DARWIN in such a nasty cannibalistic fashion, in addition to being a particularly non-turn-the-other-cheek response, in fact suggests that TRUTH is all about the survival of the fittest… which is Darwin’s idea to begin with.
Second, and more to the point, the Darwinist response will totally kick ass… all they have to do is evolve:
