The 5 Stupidest Ways People Try to Look Smart

What I'm talking about is a pathetic and pervasive belief that somehow merely mocking the possibility of God equals intelligence. A frail, desperate hope that snorting and rolling your eyes at the notion of something more important than humanity conveys wisdom. It must, right? Because the only other alternative is being one of those feeble-minded believers. One of the sheeple, right, man? (And yeah, using the term "sheeple" is another telltale sign of not being smart.)

While there are certainly many intelligent atheists, the mere act of not believing will not increase IQ. As I've said before, reading Richard Dawkins is as likely to make you a genius as reading the Bible is to make you a saint. There are horrible believers, and there are mentally challenged atheists. Faith, or the lack thereof, has nothing to do with intelligence.

Even worse, so many of today's half-assed atheists pervert the words of older, more articulate atheists with flawed paraphrases they spew across social media. Bertrand Russell -- philosopher, logician and leading atheist -- was clearly a brilliant man, and he's famous for his "celestial teapot" argument regarding the burden of proof: "Nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely." The point is, Russell made that argument in response to Christianity. It was his way of saying, don't tell me I'm going to hell for not believing. If you're the one trying to convert and proselytize, then it's your burden of proof.

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This attractive lady would like you to understand that Russell's teapot was a reaction to the proselytizing nature of the church.

That context seems lost on many today who feign intelligence while pimping their non-belief. After all, there are faiths that do not try to win new converts, and do not damn others for not adhering to their way of life. They don't need to hear how much smarter you think you are just because you're not open to the same possibilities. They have no burden of proof to convince you, because they're not asking you to believe. So spare them your Ricky Gervais quotes -- especially considering that he talks about God the way someone describes an ex-girlfriend they're "like totally over." And spare them your contempt. It makes you look many things, but smart isn't one of them.

Anyway, I bumped into some dude I hadn't seen in awhile, and said hi, what's up, and all that. Then he turned to me with a wise smile and said, "Y'know, man, I'm really into jazz these days."

"Oh," I said. "I like some jazz, but I'm not really an expert."

"Nah, man. It's all about jazz. It's all I listen to now," he replied.

"Well, I don't know much," I continued, "but I do like Thelonious Monk."

Now, for those of you who know even less about jazz than I do, by all accounts Thelonious Monk is one of the most important musicians of all time. He is to jazz what Led Zeppelin is to rock, what Johnny Cash is to country and what Taylor Swift is to music that sucks wide open ass all the time.

Stanford University
"Thanks, Gladstone. I like you, too!"

So anyway, I say I like Thelonious Monk, and his reply?

He looked all confused and said, "Wha, Melodious Funk?"

Yes. Melodious Funk. True story. I swear. And because of that he is still the poster child for a moron trying to seem smart by pretending to like jazz.

And that might be true, but, on behalf of the rest of us, please stop speaking. Are you actually trying to teach us something? Do you really have a plethora of useful factoids filling your cranium from a lifetime of study? Or did you just jump on the one chance you'll have for weeks to impress us with wisdom small enough to be written on the palm of your hand in the cheat sheet of your life?

So you can see, it's pretty clear that I'm one of those terrible people who try to seem smart by referencing Kafka. But here's the way to spot people who are really insufferable in Kafka terms: They'll drop his name or turn it into the adjective "Kafkaesque" without really having any understanding of the author.

At this point, Franz Kafka has become a spokesman for the merely strange or a champion of the common man's struggle against bureaucracy. And the people who believe that that's an accurate description of Kafka's writing are the same people who've probably never read a thing he's written. The Internet is not the place to gain a deep understanding of Franz Kafka, and I'm not quite obnoxious enough to think that I'm the one to teach it, but suffice it to say that Franz Kafka might be many things, but a man whose writing fits neatly into a simple description is not one of them.

Where most people focus on the darkness of his writing, supposedly Kafka would laugh out loud while reading his works to friends. (See? I told you he was just like me. He thought his own stuff was hilarious.) And far from being some champion of the common man against the abuse of authority, there are often no good guys in his work. If you can't be bothered to read, try to dig up Harold Pinter's adaptation of The Trial starring Kyle MacLachlan. You'll see that the protagonist, Josef K., is not just a victim of rumors from a cruel system, but also an arrogant, frightened man equally responsible (if not more so) for his suffering.

See? Doesn't it look funny?

So the next time you see a guy in a suit riding a unicycle down the street and someone says, "Dude. So Kafkaesque," just ask them if they think that Hunter Gracchus is meant to be a Christ figure, and, if not, what his true significance is. (Spoiler alert: If they answer with anything other than "I don't know," they're wrong.)