Below is the latest The Pain -- When Will It End?
Updated 12/08/04

Artist's Statement

I'd wanted to summon up some thundering moral outrage for this week's artist's statement, but I find I really don't have it in me today. Even listening to the news didn't help. I'd drawn the picture of God flicking George into the Lake of Fire as indifferently as though he were a dried booger weeks before, and finished the cartoon only because I had no better ideas last Friday.The only funny part of it, God's word balloon, was written by Boyd (an OldTestament/Marvel Comics-style Christian).

Being a grownup, I do not believe in an afterlife or a God, but I did have a religious upbringing and still retain some of the values I was taught. I was brought up by Mennonites, an austere and hardassed sect who believed in the separation of Church and State, resisted military service, and were among the earliest abolitionists in America. They got burned at the stake and drowned in barrels and fled Europe to get away from exactly the same sorts of pious intolerant fuckwits who are trying to push us around again now. Like many conservatives, I have no patience with moral relativism; the difference between us is that I think they're the ones who are evil. The war in Iraq is evil. Guantanamo Bay is evil. Bigotry, greed, and indifference to the poor and the sick--which fairly describe the Republican Party platform--are evil. George Bush is not "misguided." He is evil. His supporters are not gullible or uninformed. They're evil. Fuck them all. God, according to all the best accounts we have, does not accept excuses. And I have no doubt that, were there divine justice in this world or the next, George Bush would burn for eternity in Hell. As Thomas Jefferson said, "I tremble for my nation when I reflect that God is just, and that His justice cannot sleep forever." Atheism has brought me little comfort in life, but, depending on my mood, it sometimes makes me relieved, and sometimes regretful, that America will not be indiscriminately blasted flat by divine fiat as we deserve.