The Eight I would Really Rather You Didn'ts are the Pastafarian ethic, set out in the Gospel as commandments delivered to a pirate named Mosey on a stone tablet. The framing does the work: they are not commands but preferences, phrased as requests, from a god who would rather not make a fuss. Their content is mostly unobjectionable — do not be a sanctimonious holier-than-thou ass about His noodly goodness, do not use His name to oppress or subjugate, do not do to others what you would not want done to you. The Gospel records that there were originally ten and that two were dropped on the way down the mountain, offered as an explanation for the present state of the world. The joke and the ethic are the same sentence, which is the pattern for the whole document.