School children are taught that we don’t need God, because we are just animals who came from apes. But Susy tells her young friend that God made us, and sent his Son to give us eternal life. A children’s tract.

“A children’s tract.” Hooray! Brainwash your kids in such a way that it’s effectively an information virus that prevents their minds from even processing any new information! Awesome! No need for knowledge, or the ability to analyze the observable world — all you need is faith! Fuck you, Jack. No, seriously. I’ve said it before, but I really mean it this time.

Ah, Ms. Henn, one of Jack Chick’s favorite villains. Instead of presenting a convincing argument for his position, as always he creates an absolute demon of a character whose rational position in opposition to his is undermined not by logical fallacy or lack of evidence, but by the fact that they’re just a generally horrible person in every conceivable way. Thus, the people who end up falling for this kind of shit are the types of people who are so stupid that they choose to process their information based on which characters they identify with the most.

Actually, come to think of it, given Jack’s tendency to give his characters goofy names (see: Lou Siffer in Angels?, for instance), I wonder if Ms. Henn’s first name is Sadie or Sait or Sayde or something like that.

I’m not quite sure what’s impressing the little girl in the back so much. It could be the old teacher’s twins or the presence of the new teacher, but it could also be that the kid sitting next to her completely lacks pupils and is contorting himself into some kind of bodily labyrinth I’m having difficulty unraveling. I’m not sure if that’s an enormous sleeve, or his torso, or what’s going on.

I’ve come to believe that one of the lasting effects of Jack’s stroke was confusing the concepts of “endearing” and “horrifying”. It’s like Children of the Damned, here, or something. He’s probably going for more “doe-like innocence”, but it’s coming across as “soulless blank stares”.

This is apparently the introduction of Ms. Henn. Loyal readers will remember that some of her “close friends” include the hideous gay couple infested with demons and Satan. Or, rather, that she HOLY LIVING SHITCUNTS doesn’t throw a condescendingly moralistic shit-fit about other people’s private affairs and sexualities, and OH DEAR SWEET MERCIFUL JESUSCOCK benignly celebrates Halloween by dressing up for the occasion. What a bitch!

Only a non-Christian teacher could be so demanding and domineering. *cough* Catholic school *cough cough*

The operative term, here, is “millions of years”. From what I’ve gathered, creationists seem to be completely incapable of grasping enormous amounts of time. Part of the problem is that they’re unable to get beyond the “6,000 years” baseline, even thinking merely theoretically. It’s like if they even consider a perspective other than their own, de debbil will corrupt their minds. But even beyond that, the concept of a million years is beyond their ability to even fathom. It’s why you get stupid questions like “but how did a T-Rex give birth to a chicken?” and such, as though everything happens instantaneously. More on this later.

I think Jack — through Ms. Henn, here — is a little confused about how science works. Scientists haven’t “proven” that humans have evolved from apes, it’s just that the explanation that coincides the most with our repeated and varied observation and testing of evidence is that animals do in fact evolve. There are indeed a few hazy areas, but a hole here or there does not mean that the theory as a whole is bullshit.

Creationists like to pull this weird logical synecdoche — they’ll point to one or two instances of carbon dating being inconsistent, and claim it somehow means that carbon dating as a whole is wrong, as though if my watch shows the incorrect time, it means that all measurement of time is somehow debunked. Apparently, in order for something to be considered trustworthy, it can never, ever fuck up even once. Or, well, you just have to write it in a book at some point and reference it as The Ultimate Truth.

They also think that because theories change (or, if you will, evolve) when new information and evidence arises, that it’s “bad science” or whatever, but: a) Coming from people who think that Intelligent Design is science, it’s a pretty hilarious presumption for them to think that they’re somehow experts; and b) The fact that it does in fact change means it’s good science, in that it doesn’t ignore new evidence. Y’know, like how the Bible is constantly changing whenever there’s new information that contradicts something it says. Oh, wait.

Ms. Henn becomes Carol Channing when she gets angry, like an even more hideous and intimidating Incredible Hulk.

The “truth”, huh? I really like how she doesn’t actually have to have, y’know, any evidence that what she’s saying is the truth, she just has to declare with confidence that it is. Come on, Jack, [non-biblical citation needed]

These scenes that are devoid of background remind me a little of The Matrix. “But, grandpa, Ms. Henn is making me dress up like a witch! What do I do?” “We’re going to need guns, Susy. Lots of guns.” *enormous racks of guns sweep in from the horizon* “Ms. Henn, I told him the truth… there is no spoon.”

Yeah, there’s no other way Ms. Henn could’ve replied other than to scream about whether Susy is calling her a liar. I find this kind of interesting, actually. See, creationists need to hide under the “are you calling God a liar?” skirt whenever they don’t have any better an argument, so I’m guessing, here, that Jack thinks that the same is true for any opposition, as though nobody ever has any real arguments, it’s just a battle of the trustworthiness of my word versus the trustworthiness of God’s word.

While we’re on the subject of calling out liars, here, didn’t Christians in Europe several hundred years ago imprison anyone who posited that the Earth orbited the sun and not the other way around? After all, Psalm 93:1 states that “The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved”, and the Bible is always right. Wouldn’t want to call God a liar, now, would we? Because it’s absolutely inconceivable that the Bible might not have been directly inspired by God, or that even if it was, the human intermediaries might’ve gotten something wrong.

Someone explain to me again why her peers — or, fuck, anyone for that matter — refer to Susy as “Li’l Susy”. Maybe it’s a nickname she got from an Everly Brothers fan because she was sleeping in class all the time or something.

You know, a few panels ago, I was thinking, “You know what this Tract could use? More children’s asses.” So thanks, Jack.

Embarrass her? Any teacher worth their salt wouldn’t be “embarrassed” by an idiotic and stubborn student. Like, if Susy said, “Ms. Henn, gravity is a lie! All things are tied to the ground with invisible tethers woven by pixies and secured by gremlins,” or hung a sign around her neck that said “I’m a total fucking retard. Disregard everything I say, for it is all moronic,” why would that be in any way embarrassing for Ms. Henn?

Anyway, a real teacher and not just some made-up wretch who possesses as much of an understanding of evolution or science as Chick himself would be able to inform the class in a rational fashion why Susy is misguided, and why her views with regard to evolutionary theory are outmoded and essentially baseless.

As awful as Ms. Henn is, and as much as Jack’s trying to paint her as the antithesis of Christian or whatever with her “never forgive or forget” thing, she’s still a lot more merciful and kind than God in that she doesn’t torture people for a fucking eternity.

She really, really does look like a really ugly guy in drag.

Jesus Cockwarming Jizzyodeling Shitbowling Assmarmalade Eustace Christ, get it fucking straight, through your thick motherfucking noggin: Science is not about believing. It’s not just “whatever I tell you is what the truth is”. It’s not “I’m just going to make up a bunch of bullshit and claim it’s true without any explanation WHY or HOW”.

Science is not religion. Science is TAKING OBSERVABLE, TESTABLE EVIDENCE AND OBSERVING AND TESTING IT, AGAIN AND AGAIN UNTIL YOU NARROW DOWN THE MOST FITTING EXPLANATION FOR WHAT IS TAKING PLACE. Evolution isn’t just something Charles Darwin wrote in a notebook and a bunch of dong-gargling ass-kissers all blindly agreed with it like giggling numbfucks. It’s not a bunch of people thinking it sounds like it makes sense by merit of the idea’s own logic alone.

Seriously, just shut UP already. Goddamnit.

I also like how she claims the evidence for evolution from apes is overwhelming, but instead of actually presenting any of it, she talks about the extinction of the dinosaurs. WAY TO GRASP A CONCEPT, JACK. No wonder creationists think evolution is ridiculous, if this is how they think it’s presented. “One day, we’ll live in space. Man evolved from apes! ARE YOU CALLING ME A LIAR THEY DID I MEAN IT SERIOUSLY. Here’s the evidence: A meteor killed the dinosaurs. That’s it, lesson over. Evolution, ladies and gentlemen. Any questions? WHAT? YOU DARE QUESTION ME?”

Children! Terrifying children! I think that’s Li’l Drew Carey over on the far left, there.

It’s easy to convince someone that something is ridiculous and unfounded if you either have no fucking clue what you’re talking about, or you’re intentionally leaving out information or explaining it like you’re retarded. You could make just about anything sound misguided.

SCIENCE

Okay, for any creationists or fundamentalists or whatever who might be reading this, here’s a quickie explanation of evolution: There’s an island called Pingelap, in the Pacific Ocean. Several generations ago, a man on the island was born with a rare hereditary form of achromatopsia (colorblindness) that didn’t just make him confuse the color blue with another color, it prevented him from perceiving it at all. A tropical storm wiped out nearly all the population save for a handful of people, including this man. As a result, a relatively large number of people on this island now have this same genetic colorblindness.

Meanwhile, there’s a family in Mexico who are afflicted with hypertricosis, another genetic condition/mutation that makes them completely covered in hair. (Google for Jesus Aceves.) Now, if instead of colorblindness, which isn’t really all that physically apparent, the Pingelap ancestor was afflicted with genetic hypertricosis, the island would be populated by a bunch of people who all bear a resemblance to wolf-men. And this is all within several generations. Extrapolate changes like this over millions of years (and you really need to wrap your mind around a timespan that large), and you can see how the developing genetic snowball could result in a radically different creature from the one we call “human” today.

I understand it’s difficult to comprehend the kinds of situations that would facilitate more rapid evolution, given that today, there are many people who survive, thanks to modern technology and medicine, who wouldn’t have under shittier conditions. But if you take into account tribal warfare, weather, natural disasters (like the tropical storm on Pingelap), and the myriad other ways for large numbers of people to be wiped out, and you combine it with the extremely low populations of humans that initially existed, a genetic mutation in a single individual that might today seem like no big deal at all could’ve resulted in a dramatic change to the development of humanity into what we currently are.

There are a lot of subtle differences that can take place from one generation to the next, and even more dramatic ones that can result from mutations, especially with the increase in potential genetic abnormalities that come as a result of inbreeding. So for human attributes to change radically over the course of millions of years is far from unfathomable. It’s just that you have to get over the notion that just because someone — divinely inspired or otherwise — wrote “6,000 years” in a book somewhere, that doesn’t mean that’s how it actually happened. (See also: Aforementioned thing about the Earth being fixed and unmoving. Please keep in mind that the Bible was written when people were even dumber than we are today.)

/SCIENCE

Whew. Anyway. Yeah, birds all just sprung fully-formed from the loins of dinosaurs, or something. Shut up.

* See this other thing that we also published, which astonishingly supports everything we claim here.

Well, my God, a giant omnipotent bee that lives in the center of the sun and controls every atom with its infinite invisible arms (and I challenge you to prove she doesn’t exist) was there at the very beginning of creation, too, and it told me that the Earth was created when it was particularly moved by something and clapped its hands and everything just kind of suddenly came into being. It told me this via a series of musical tones that corresponded to different letters, played by a toad that smashed the horn as soon as it was finished with the composition and then hopped away so I have no evidence. I just have yet to write it down and get millions of people to believe it two thousand years from now, is all.

So, I’m confused: Why weren’t Adam and Eve eaten by a Tyrannosaurus Rex? Did God somehow change its nature at some point between its inception as an apparently docile creature and the violent beast we know today? If so, why? And why didn’t God change dinosaurs to be better suited to the after-flood environment?

Most people will end up in hell, Timmy, because God is love. God loves us so much, in fact, that he’s willing to torture us and/or our loved ones for an eternity over something that by all logical accounts is actually his fault. So you’d better believe in him, so that you can be by his side forever, watching him relentlessly destroy good people for no real reason.

Give this Tract to your children, so they can learn to be just as smug as Li’l Susy! Remember, all you need are the Three Ps: Practice, Patience and Pissheaded self-righteousness.

For the record, I’m an agnostic. I try to be scientifically-minded enough that I refuse to draw definite conclusions about things for which there is no observable, testable evidence either way. I think it’s possible God could exist, and I don’t see how such an existence — provided he’s not an enormous dickhead who thinks it’s a fun game to make all of reality completely different than it actually appears so that he can torture people forever — would necessarily conflict with any scientific laws or theories we’ve discovered. Again, an omnipotent being would be capable of more than just “I’m making an unchanging blob of creation that I never want to advance or develop in any way, save for when I decide to remove a snake’s legs or something, or arbitrarily make a bird more capable of obtaining food, or when I want a species to just completely die off with no replacement for no real reason”.

She looks just like a chipmunk, only instead of packing her cheeks with nuts, they’re filled to capacity with self-important moralist bullshit.

You know, sometimes I think that fundamentalists are such thoroughly horrible people because they actually want to provoke someone into becoming the Antichrist, as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Eventually, someone’s going to get so sick of their shit that he or she actually assumes power and rounds them all up into camps and kills them simply because it’s what fundies seem to want, and because they don’t seem to think this lifetime is of any real importance. “Let’s make every intelligent person’s life miserable so that one of them will eventually mercilessly persecute us, just like we always wanted!”

“But Ms. Henn’s lesson is going to keep me from going to heaven? Well, that just pudges my jowls!”

Round One: Ol’ Devil vs. Li’l Susy! FIGHT!

“DUHHH, WHAT’S A JESUS?” He seems to have some vague awareness of who Jesus is, but is unsure of the specifics. Like, you’d think if someone told him about Jesus at all, they’d have mentioned the implications within Christianity and all that.

This is scary, all right. Calculatedly so.

What the hell is she doing with her mouth? It’s like she’s about to puke up some partially-digested worms for some baby birds or something. I’d kind of like to make an animated gif of this where a huge turd slides out of her mouth a la that one episode of South Park.

“Did Jesus get away?” “Nope.” I mean, fuck, come on, how much dumber can this dialog get?

“…no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” Jesus: semen courier.

Yeah, he’s coming back “real soon”, all right. You know, for as long as people have been saying this, it really doesn’t seem like it’s that spectacularly close at this point. Now, if they’re willing to concede that the world is millions of years old, then yeah, if Jesus comes back within the next several thousand years, it’s relatively “real soon”. But if people have been thinking this since just after Jesus’s death, two thousand years and counting out of six isn’t really all that “soon”.

Fun fact: Whenever someone turns to the side, their pupils and irises totally disappear.

So, bullshit. Unless a requirement is to completely ignore everything around one’s self, faith has to change with science.

What’s this “Old Devil” stuff, anyway? Is there, like, a “Young Devil” and an “Old Devil”? The former is some kind of sex icon who challenges the conservative perspectives of the adult generation, and the latter is all fat and bloated and eventually dies early in a bathroom in Graceland?

Oh, just shut up and go away already, you dumb, self-righteous little shits. The gopher look is actually rather appropriate, considering how deeply she’s burrowed her head up her own ass.

So, here’s a question: Why wouldn’t God want us to intellectually progress in any way? I know the Bible has a pretty deep anti-intellectual sentiment, starting with Genesis with the awfulness of the Tree of Knowledge, but it seems pretty fucking boring to create something and have it stay the same forever. Ooh, boy, Adam and Eve could frolic around in the garden like retards for the rest of time. Hooray! How exciting. Considering God’s mind would be boundless if he were truly omnipotent, you’d think he’d have better things to do than closely monitor total morons.

My mind is not, in fact, boundless, but even I would be bored if I were just watching or participating in something interactive that never changed. Imagine playing a video game where there were no real achievements, no rewards, no progression, no change at all. Like, the first screen of the original Super Mario Bros for the NES, only modified so that the screen never starts moving to the right when you walk in that direction.

If the Bible was really divinely inspired, maybe by “be fruitful and multiply”, God wasn’t only talking about pumping more of us out of our genitals, but being intellectually fruitful and actually accomplishing something with our existence. Become more, progress, fucking do something.

Then again, this entire existence is apparently some kind of arbitrary, meaningless “test” or something on our way to greater reward. Why God doesn’t just plop us all into wherever we’ll eventually be ending up is beyond me.

Until next time, everyone.