Lent. &#039Tis the season of Lent, and all throughout town, no chocolate is eaten, not even the white. Yeah, so I&#039m starting off goofy for a rant which is actually piquing my brain like spicy Mexican food. Lent. Easter. Catholics. I just can&#039t seem to get around religious holidays despite my obvious lack of enthusiasm. Thanks, commercialism and the Christian majority. It&#039s nice knowing that I live in a country without a national religion where everyone&#039s free to practice what they wish without the pressures of conforming. Yay!

Regardless. I don&#039t want to lament the unfortunate state of commercialism or the pains of the minority&#039s minority&#039s minority. I want to lament the bizarre state of the Catholic church and the views people hold about it both within and without the institution. Sounds long-winded, eh? It is. I don&#039t know how long this rant will go on; maybe I&#039ll post half of it today and the other half tomorrow. We&#039ll see.

So, back to Lent. I won&#039t go into the bizarre things that non-Catholics say about the Church such as &#034Catholics worship Mary&#034 or &#034Catholics aren&#039t Christians&#034 because those are just dumb and are for another rant. Instead, it&#039s about the rules and laws governing Catholics and how people perceive them being on the outside. Having grown up in a Catholic church where I was discouraged from asking too many questions by far too many Bible School teachers and Religion Classes teachers, it wasn&#039t until much later that I came to understand a lot about the Church and was really the set of guidelines for its members versus what were leftovers from the older population in our community.