Reading books does not make you smarter than people.

L“For friends... do but look upon good Books:  they are true friends, that will neither flatter nor dissemble”  - Francis Bacon, philosopher, author, self-important douche-bag.

When it comes to the most ostensibly earnest statements in the world “I’m a reader” is definitely numero one. It seems like you’re just revealing something about yourself, that you make a habit of reading, but what it really means is “I am smarter than you, you TV watching, knuckle dragging, shit-chucking ape of a Neanderthal-cannibal”. People who purportedly love reading rarely talk about books with you, they will talk at you. It’s like talking to a new mother about their baby or a car-lover about their car, just a constant stream of information that the recipient simply does not care about. Except unlike a new-mother or a car-fan, readers aren’t genuinely excited, they for the most part just want to impress you with the fact that while you’re busy with your video games they are developing into an intellectual genius. As if the simple act of reading a book is an impressive feat. It’s not. Anyone can read a book. If you’re reading this right now you can read a book, except I have the decency to keep these posts to less than five hundred words so you can go back to looking up nude pictures of that Cortana hologram from Halo (just take safesearch off google images. You’ll find what you’re looking for).

It doesn’t even matter what the person is reading either. You could read the Twilight saga and still consider yourself an intellectual heavyweight. That said, some reader-jerks will insist that the classics are the best. They will proudly list their literary conquests on facebook, as opposed to the more direct route of just posting their penis measurements. Have you read Crime and Punishment? It sucks. But if you decide to waste months of your life painstakingly (and it is painful) reading it then congratulations, you can now consider yourself better than all those better looking jerks who (rightfully) bullied you in high school.

Books used to be important. But now there’s television, movies, video games and the internet which are simply better. Reading books should be viewed as just an antiquated habit, but because of the fact that less people participate in the time-consuming process of book reading its status has elevated. What used to be something everyone did has now become an elite status symbol for those who pretend they don’t have anything better to do. Everybody used to read in the 1800s. And if the books of the 1800s are to be believed, they were all assholes.

Francis Bacon believed books to be the best of friends, similarly, William Feather famously opined that; "Finishing a good book is like leaving a good friend." Both men clearly never had any friends.

God is either really lazy, or a total dick.

Since the beginning of time, the question of whether or not the universe is under the control of an omniscient being has dominated. When everybody thought the earth was flat and the sun was just a dude who loved rotating around it god (or gods) was (or were) a given (or givens).

But things have changed since then. It is now generally accepted that the earth revolves around the sun, you can’t just bleed out illnesses,  the appearance of a black crow does not necessarily mean somebody is dying (unless said crow is actively killing someone) and cracking your knuckles won’t give you arthritis. But of all the outmoded notions in the world, the belief in god persists like that ‘cold sore’ of yours. Cut the shit, you can’t get a cold sore on your junk.

Anyway, I’m not one to say there is definitely no god. There are three distinct camps when it comes to his (or her, but let’s not dick around, his) existence. There are believers, who cannot prove god exists but can prove faith exists, there are atheists, who cannot prove god doesn’t exist but can prove you can’t prove he does, and then there are agnostics, who aren’t concerned about proving or disproving and probably just love sitting on fences. Which is fair, have you sat on a fence recently? It’s incredible. Fence sitting is fucking cash money. There’s a reason cats do it all the time. But I digress.

So let’s ignore theological arguments and operate under the assumption that god does exist. The Christian one. Reading the bible, it is safe to assume that god is the greatest villain known to man. In one of the more popular stories, he drowns the entire planet because he thinks people are being jerks. He also continuously smites people who don’t believe in him (insecure much?).  

To be fair the bible was written by people, so maybe they’re just telling filthy lies about old-G. So let’s look at god today. Christians will tell you he has a plan for everyone, and this is where he just appears lazy.

His plan for the majority of people living in the developed world is to work at a job they hate until they hit their sixties, have a few kids during that time and then die by the time they’re 80. The sheer uniformity of people’s lives indicate that the guy just doesn’t give a fuck anymore. It’s worse in Angola, where the infant mortality rate is 178 out of every thousand born. So either God only has a (pretty dull) plan for the comparably affluent citizens of the world, or he fucking hates Angolese babies.

It’s no surprise that so many rich people become born again Christians. If you’re as lucky as they are then the existence of god would seem pretty plausible. But it’s less plausible for people too poor to clothe themselves, or too ill to feed themelves, or too gay to exist in Bob Katter’s Queensland (look at me! look how political I am!). The Jonas brothers believe in god, and were I a Jonas brother, making millions of dollars to play ready-made hits with the promise of as much christian-teen poon as I wanted the minute I misplaced my promise ring, I’d believe in the cat too. But we can’t all be Jonas brothers. Which is perhaps our greatest tragedy.