Who needs a priest when you can just confess online?

I'm immensely grateful to an anonymous commenter on an old post about the Catholic Church's seven new deadly sins, who has alerted me to a website where sinners can gather to confess online.

I Confess Myself markets itself as a place where you can "Let it all off your chest in a risk-free environment", and is basically a blog with 7 posts covering Gluttony, Sloth, Lust, Envy, Greed, Wrath and Pride. All you need to do is leave a comment on the relevant post to get those pesky sins off your chest.

A quick look through the confessions shows they range from the mundane – "I ate a McDonald's meal and now I feel sick" – to the downright callous – "I was so jealous of my friend being skinny that I kept pushing her to eat more until she got pudgy and then I made fun of her until she got an eating disorder."

Okay, so the website hasn't really taken off yet and, if you ask me, it's lacking some good old fire and brimstone qualities, but this didn't stop me thinking – imagine if the Catholic Church, with its 2,000 years of history, ended up being replaced by a blog.

Web Exclusive: Facebook knows I'm an atheist

In our latest web exclusive article, technology writer Bill Thompson reveals how millions of social networkers are identifying themselves as atheists on Facebook, and asks what the consequences of this might be.

There's been a lot written recently on whether Facebook users are risking their privacy by giving too much information away (see Tom Hodkinson's recent attack in the Guardian on the people behind the site), and Bill's article provides an atheist take on all this. Are the self-identified godless networkers leaving themselves open to snooping from both advertisers and the CIA, or are they doing their bit to help raise the profile of atheism?