What's wrong with Religion?

Many people who know me are aware that I have issues with religion, and I'm not referring to any type of religion. In my opinion, all religions are dangerous, some more than others, but it is my sincere belief that the world would be a much better place without any form of religion. I admit that there was once a time when I seriously wanted to believe in all the magics that tried to answer the most fundamental of human questions, but for me this was impossible. I even took my A-Level in religion so as to try and understand how such feeble and childish beliefs are still popular in this age of reason (BTW, I passed my A-Level with a B-merit :)). My education on the subject further proved to me how insane the whole topic is. But I still wanted to believe, I mean if everyone around me believes and has faith, then why can't I? Surely there is nothing wrong with faith?
One day I was zapping through the channels on TV and a documentary on Auschwitz happened to get my attention. I must say that I was very familiar with the historical happenings during the Nazi reign but I had also never seen what had really happened, the visuals were horrifying...it was the ugliest thing that I had ever seen in my entire life. I just couldn't understand how people could do things like this to other people. There are still many people who follow Nazi ideologies; how can there be people who are so evil? The truth is that these people aren't evil at all, they don't hide a set of horns under their hair, they don't take part in satanic rituals during their weekends and I'm sure that they don't have a taste for human flesh. These are people who like the smell of flowers, like chocolate, hate Monday mornings, love watching funny movies and enjoy a Saturday night-out with their buddies. They also happen to have a strong belief that they're superior to some other people because of their lineage, the way they look etc... Nazism is an ideology, a belief based on strong human emotions and these people have been raised up in an environment that respects that kind of ideology. This is exactly what's dangerous about religion; faith being the basis of most, if not all religions, asks people that they should belief in something completely without including reason and rationality. This is all well and good if you want to believe in something but if you're making a whole society believe in something which goes against all reason then yes I have a big problem with that. If you're throwing rationality out of the window, and making everyone in a society do the same, you'll soon get incidents like children dying because their parents refuse blood transfusion, religion being taught in schools instead of science, suicide bombings, holy wars, women being punished/killed because they have been raped (don't tell me that there is any rationality behind this one), hanging homosexuals, burning people at the stake, shooting women for showing an inch of their skin etc etc. A society following rules written down in an archaic piece of literature is something very scary and people should have nightmares about it.
We are finally advancing into an age of reason and the fact that people are still blindly believing what they're being told to believe instead of reasoning things just highlights the vast difference between static ideologies and the more dynamic ones which engage people in complex cognitives processes.
Many people justify their faith by saying that it gives them meaning and that it somehow teaches them love and compassion towards one another. This is very true and if you seriously believe that then I would certainly not stop you but it's also true that to feel connected with the ultimate meaning of life and be loving towards your neighbor you don't need to believe that God impregnated a woman with magic. These are the the irrational beliefs that make people dangerous because they are things that require absolute belief and it's so easy for others to make fun of these beliefs. You can't expect a Muslim to believe in a virgin birth, and you can't expect a Christian to believe that if you sacrifice your life to Islam you will be rewarded with 72 virgins. In short, religion divides people by making them believe in things which aren't real, it stops them from forming real moral values; who would you think is doing a good deed? Christians who spend there life helping the needy because they wants to go to heaven and please their god? What about people who choose to help the needy because they truly believe that there actions will make a difference to the better? Religious people usually do their version of good by following the rules that they've been taught. If one of these rules allowed people to kill each other because they had black hair, I am 100% sure that there will be people who will actually do it. This is exactly what happened with Nazis, they really thought that what they were doing was right...it's not the people who are evil, but rather it's the ideologies that are truly evil. And anyway, I don't see why people are still searching for the true meaning of life and everything, it's so obvious that the answer is 42.

Making money with Adsense and Blogger

A few months ago I read some posts on a random blog about Google's Adsense and while I admit that it all sounded too good to be true, I decided to try it out...so off I went to the Adsense site and created my account. Setup was really easy (seeing as I already had an account with Google's Gmail) and I managed to place my first adverts on a Freewebs website I already had. I thought that this would be enough to start earning cash with Adsense...I was dismally disappointed. So I started thinking of creating a better site where people are most likely to visit for information...a bit more research and I realized that the best informational sites are blogs which deal with one particular subject. Blogger.com is a free, easy to use, blog facility by Google. If you already have a Gmail account, setup is extra-easy. My first Blog was about dieting...more blogs followed (this being one of them). The following are some pointers that might help you earn some easy-cash with adsense:

1. Increase hits to your website. This is without doubt the most important thing to consider since the more visitors you get, the more clicks you receive. You get more visitors by promoting your blog and by exposing as many direct-links to your blog as possible. This will make it possible for search engines to rank your blog. I found that the best way to do this is to register yourself with a forum that is relevant to your blog, and include a direct link to your blog in the signature, so that each time you place a post on the forum, there will be a direct link to your blog.
   
2. Make people re-visit your blog. You do this by writing high-concept, well-written, relevant and interesting posts. Also you need to make your visitors understand that you are interested in them and in what they think, you can do this by replying to any comments that your visitors leave on your blog. You might also consider leaving comments on your visitors' blogs. By creating a good relationship with your visitors you will be able to exchange links which are then placed on either blog (another method of exposing your blog and to let search engines rank your blog).
3. Make interesting posts. As I have already mentioned, your posts need to be interesting so as to stop visitors from hitting the back-button on their browser and to encourage visitors to visit your blog again. Interesting posts must not have grammatical mistakes, should be concise, straight to the point, relevant and, if possible, include some humor. Also, posts which include relevant pictures and video clips are more interesting than posts which are only text-based. So make it a point to include at least one picture in each post.
4. After you start receiving huge amounts of visitors (5000 visitors a day can be considered as really good), you need to increase your CTR (click through rate), i.e. how many visitors click on the adverts. The higher the CTR, the more you earn. Once I earned $3 from just 2 clicks because the first 2 visitors to my blog clicked on an advert. On another occasion, I received less than $2 from about 50 clicks, simply because many of my visitors did not click on the adverts. To increase your CTR, you must include keywords in your posts that generate relevant ads. For example, if your blog is about dieting, make sure that you mention the word 'diet' as much as possible in all your posts. To increase your CTR you must also place your ads in the appropriate place on your blog. For example, adverts at the bottom of a page are known to result in a very low CTR simply because people do not see them.
5. Be patient. If you've never done this before don't expect to start earning from day one, in fact, don't expect to start earning unless your blog is about 2 months old. Make frequent (at least one every 2 days) relevant posts with relevant titles, include as many relevant keywords as possible, and expose the blog's link in as many online places as possible so that search engines will be able to find your blog.

I cannot really say how much I earn from my blog because Google AdSense does not allow it's members to divulge their earnings. Suffice it to say that for now I'm not complaining although there is still a lot of improvement to be expected. Also I'm still in the process of promoting my blogs so I'm expecting a lot more visitors than what I'm getting right now, which will obviosly mean in more income :)
That's it I guess, happy blogging and good luck!

Tomorrow won't come soon enough

Have you ever had that feeling when you wake up in the morning and you totally don't feel like going to work and you can't really look forward to the end of the day because you'll know that after the day's work you'll have to go to work again the next morning and the morning after that? Come Thursday and you start school which is better than work at least cos you'll be with your friends and there are no major responsibilities...but still school is not real freedom...can't wait for the weekend...but wait! Saturday is another school day :( which only leaves Sunday...a whole day of freedom...if only I didn't have to waste the whole day working on my assignments and hope that I'll be able to finish them in time. Monday starts again and it's back to work and I really don't feel like going. It would be so much better if I stayed in bed and maybe continue that dream where I won the lottery, opened a business that started self-sustaining from day one and spent the next 10 years of my life spreading my genes around, got married 15 times to the hottest models, had a palace all of my own, spent another 10 years living on a deluxe giant-yacht, spent my last years living in a Californian suburb where all the resident's dreams have come true and yet the lawns are as green as any other suburban paradise and all the picket fences are white-washed every day and all that needs to be done is wait for that single moment right before I die when my whole life flashes in front of my eyes and it'll be like watching the best movie ever.gtg now, have to get back to my work