I Guess I May Never Understand

I was just going along on my merry digital way when I came across this from CBSNews.com:

“The Vatican insisted Friday that it is properly following Christian tradition by excluding females from the priesthood. And it issued a new warning that women taking part in ordinations will be excommunicated.” (Link)

Now maybe I just don’t understand. I just have a hard time figuring out why women would want anything to do with organized Catholic/Christian religions to begin with. A belief system that uses allegory to help people along the way of finding a divine sense within themselves and opening themselves up to understanding that the world is about more than just one person, I can buy that. I totally support it. But a religion organized to strip away the spirituality behind the stories, and that puts immense effort (and takes great delight) in making a hierarchy among human beings to ensure the dominance of only one part of the living spectrum, I don’t see any use in that. As a woman, I have absolutely no desire to have anything to do with a group of men bound and determined to eliminate the female side of the spiritual whole and to subjugate women perpetually.

Enough Pain To Cry Over Isn’t Enough

My ideas on health care fall about where all my other ideas do – somewhere in between what the two sides are usually promoting (but never actually start). But I thought I’d respond to someone (who shall remain nameless because he won’t respond to my emails asking if I can quote him directly) who claims that the reason our current system is the best is because everyone has access to it and we can always go to the emergency room if we can’t pay a doctor’s co-pay. Two personal experiences to counter that idea.

A couple weeks ago my mother suddenly got a shooting pain in her shoulder. Fearing a heart attack and also worried because it was the same arm her PICC line is in, I rushed her to the emergency room. She checked in, crying in pain, and I told the nurse up front about her PICC line and my worries that something may have gone wrong with it. That her crying in pain and grabbing at her shoulder couldn’t be a good thing.