A Tale of Two Institutions

If you have read some of my other posts, you might be able to infer that I have very little tolerance/respect for some of our "institutions".  Political parties would have to be first and foremost -- I cannot for the life of me think why any self-respecting, thinking, rational human being would get within a country mile of one.

Another is "organized religion" -- or any religion with a name on it.  Again many of my reasons are the same as political parties, it is a very humanity-denying and somewhat abasing thing to commit to  a religion...particularly if you were not even given a choice in the matter but were "born" into it.  However, with religions I am a bit more tolerant in terms of respect.  I understand and appreciate that they can serve a useful purpose (thousands of different ones it seems), and are a key part of many people's lives.

I saw something today though that made me think of this again.  The pope has announced that he is willing to discuss moving some of the Catholic church's powers away from the Vatican, and to redefine some of the powers of the papacy.

What struck me is that this is the second major institution to get things completely "ass-backwards".  Churches (particularly the Catholics, but others as well) have this tradition of semi-divine central authority commanding a worldwide religion.  Yet I think that of all the endeavors, religion is best practiced "close to home" (locally) within perhaps some broad guidance.

Now, the second institution is so messed up it takes two levels of government to do it -- the US Government and the state's governments...or more particularly the "states rights" folks.  The Constitution basically says "anything the Feds do not or will not do, is the responsibility of the states".  Unfortunately, our states have massively f***d up their part of the bargain in at least two important areas: education and health care.  They have given us the worst health care "system" in the first world with untold riches for CEOs of the death panel/insurance companies, but costs four to six times other countries and medical results that are in the bottom half of the pack.  

And the (until recently) completely state-run US education system is an unmitigated, long running disaster.  We rank at the bottom of most first-world countries, and yet people howl when they can't use their local school boards to teach "creationism" or to rewrite history so that slavery never occurred.