Karma, Dharma, Pudding & Pie

“Karma, dharma, pudding, and pie...” isn’t exactly how we remember the line read to us in our tender years. But then, nursery rhymes are no longer thought of in the same way either—as innocent little... Read More
Cathartic Comics

...an assortment of cartoons and comic strips about humanism, atheism, religion, science and freethought.HumanistNetworkNews.org May 13, 2009 Freethunk! Comics and humor for freethinkers and potential freethinkers. You're not crazy, they are! COPYRIGHT JEFF SWENSON The... Read More
Attendance Check

Swapping cigarettes, jabs, chips, they drift like Rockaway waves from the boys home into the classroom, ninth graders no one would bet on, discarded by split parents. The deck of misfortune they inherited keeps shoving... Read More
The Reason “Everything Happens for a Reason”

The following is an excerpt from Living Without God: New Directions for Atheists, Agnostics, Secularists, and the Undecided by Ronald Aronson (Counterpoint Press, 2008) Belonging to an impatient culture promising instant answers, often poorly equipped... Read More
Against Optimism

It’s a lonely fight, no more so than when the broken rhododendron--an ancient spidery thing just off the back porch-- flares for two fiery weeks each May, so scarlet and profuse, so labial, well, it... Read More
Paradiso

Paradiso No blue grocery bags rustle from the lindens lining the freshly paved avenues. No women stop before windows to stare at mannequins blank as angels. A dog barks from a rose garden. Motor scooters... Read More
Of Crows

The beauty of crows should not be forgotten. When colored bullets race down the road's black veins, Their short, broad wings deliver them skyward. A crow's tastes are unsentimental, a testament To the infinite hunger... Read More