CREATION SCIENCE MUTATES
Artist's introduction by Jeff Swenson

It feels like forever since I put the last Freethunk Ebook collection together, as well as starting the Freethunk site. I'm starting to notice, or at least become more aware of, other cartoonists who are putting out material that is critical of religion and superstitious thinking. Though, many of them would not want to be called an atheist or agnostic or even a freethinker.

But I don't mind being labeled at this point in my life. They're going to do it to me anyhow once they read the cartoons, so I say embrace it and have fun with it. I am an agnostic-atheist which means: Because I cannot know, therefore I cannot believe.

For the cover of this Ebook I made the focus on Creationism and most likely I went overboard with the illustration. The mutating creature simply represents all of the attempts to disguise creationism as something else, most notably "Intelligent Design." The creature itself has one foot on a creation science institute and one foot on the public school system, which is crumbling. Activist Creationists keep plugging away at our govenment and courts in order to find an inroad into education and they may eventually win a major battle because persistant pays off and "the fairness argument" is becoming prevalent even among those reasonable Americans who don't accept a literal interpretation of The Bible.

BUT science is science, and American students are suffering at the hands of religious politics. One of my biggest regrets is my poor scientific education growing up. I don't even remember going over evolution in class, most likely it was a brief chapter that I yawned through. It seems to me, even with the religious mindset that I had, if an articulate science teacher could have laid out what evolution was , expounded on it and then gave a test on it I might have not so easily accepted creationism up until I was 23. What's worse, after becoming an agnostic, I still didn't accept evolution for almost 2 years because I thought it was full of holes and misinformation--due to what I had been taught by the likes of Ken Ham, Henry Morris and Duane Gish. I have had to literally reeducate myself with what spare time I have on evolution and the scientific method.

Because of my own experience I completely understand why the vast amount of Americans have a poor understanding of Evolution, including a lot of our elected officials. And it's going to get worse I believe before it gets better. Creationists and Literalists are well-funded and they are not going to stop. Combine that with our often failing public school system and the feeding frenzy by religious denominations using pop culture to gobble any youngster they can with Christian Rock, End Time movies, and Veggie Tales 3D cartoons and you can look forward to a whole new generation with poor critical thinking skills and an aversion to modern science.

So here's another collection of Freethinking cartoons that will hopefully make you laugh in the face of willful ignorance. I wish I could be more optimistic about the educational climate of our youth but right now I'm more focused on continuing to knock-down the same old arguments that are continually being repackaged. It's a tough road for all of us who are tired of seeing the same nonsense being thrown back at us and being told we're the ones who are damned by our rejection of unverifiable mythology.

Thanks for reading...