The eternal questions are addressed by many religions all claiming to be the only way. Take your pick.
All the doors open on the same thing and the arrow points upwards towards nothing.
Pete Smith’s Cartoons of Genius – Religion
Pete Smith’s Cartoons of Genius – Science should be a celebration!
We both felt that our Biology course was dire. Our Science education was reductionary and all about dissecting and breaking things down.
Science education should be about illuminating the wonders of the universe, celebrating life and the joy of living. Science is about investigating the mysteries. It should be life-affirming and joyous.
Looking at dead things through microscopes was a million miles from the happy life Pete and I had experienced in our childhood, wading through ponds and streams, climbing trees, lying in meadows while the dynamo of nature hummed around us and infinity was all around.
We wanted better education – better science!! More Wonder and Awe!!
Pete Smith’s Cartoons of Genius – The future lies within
A baby girl is born with all the eggs she will ever have – about 400,000. Not all of them will become eggs. Most will wither away.
A boy is born without a single sperm and won’t produce any until he reaches puberty. Then he begins to make up for lost time. He can produce more sperm in an hour than girls can produce eggs in a lifetime.
But inside us all is the DNA that is the future of the race – that gives rise to future generations. We all have the future generations of life within our bodies.
Pete Smith – Cartoons of Genius – Solutions shared problems solved.
This was a quick sketch of a much more intricate cartoon. I’ll try and dig out all those full drawings later today.
The idea of this is very simple. We all have this questions, worries and fears locked up in our heads. They bedevil us. We also have solutions to conundrums except the solutions we have don’t solve our own problems. They might solve somebody else’s though. Only by coming together and helping each other can we make a better world and help each other come to terms with the things that worry them.
Pete Smith – Cartoons of Genius – The god of Time
Pete Smith – Genius Cartoons – The world is wondrous when we allow it to be.
Pete and I both had this feeling that children see the world in all its splendour but as we grow up that gets knocked out of us; they get told how to view things, what to appreciate and what is good and what is bad.
Bad education makes a chore out of looking at things that should be wondrous.
We should encourage people to be able to look at something beautiful and see its beauty magnified in our minds. That is education – understanding and celebrating the wonders of the universe.
Pete Smith – Genius cartoons – bursting the childhood bubble
The things we do to our children. The lies we tell. We furnish them with dragons, tooth fairies and Santa Claus. We foist religion on them.
Then we ridicule them for believing things or enjoy ripping their world to bits. We take away the tooth fairy, Santa Claus and dragons and ridicule them for daydreaming.
A shame we didn’t take away the religion too!
Perhaps we should let that childhood imagination blossom?
Pete summed it up in his cartoons from 1971.
Pete Smith – Genius Cartoons – Nuclear questions
I grew up with the threat of nuclear war hanging over my head. I know that even now I have a number of nuclear missiles aimed right at me. For me nuclear war almost looked inevitable.
I think we were used as an aircraft carrier for the USA. They cynically believed they could fight a limited war with the USSR which would involve Europe but not the USA. A third Word War and nuclear holocaust was a real possibility.
Fortunately it hasn’t happened yet. But the possibility still exists.
I am in favour of unilateral disarmament but, of course, would much prefer multilateral disarmament. I do not believe that nuclear weapons make us safer.
The interesting thing about this cartoon is that the nuclear explosion is made up of question marks. We all have these huge seismic questions in our heads about life, purpose, meaning, mysticism, morality, afterlife and what is sacred. They are the nuclear bombs inside our heads.
Pete Smith’s cartoons of genius – Religious Lies strangling us.
So much to see in this image. The person runs through the tangle of life with the question WHY over his head and MEANING and TIME before him, using the LI of religion as crutches while his head was caught in the noose of GOD. God with the knot of infinity – the unsolvable conundrum.
MUST DO THIS – WHY – WRONG
Pete Smiths cartoons of genius – trapped, restrained
I think we all have those unanswerable questions in our head. We crave to be free to explore and find the answers to our existence, to penetrate the mystery, but we are held back by all the restrictions. Society, convention and the strictures of family, career and life in general clamp us down in their cloying chains.
How we long to be free!