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.

Deadly sins for the modern age

As suspected, those good folks in the Vatican really are making it up as they go along. For the first time in Catholic history the seven deadly sins have been brought up to date to accommodate the perceived ills of the modern world.

To coincide with the Pope's condemnation of the secularised world's "decreasing sense of sin", the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano yesterday published seven new ones which, according to Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary (it "oversees confessions and plenary indulgences", apparently), take account of "new sins which have appeared on the horizon of humanity as a corollary of the unstoppable process of globalisation."

The new sins can be listed as follows:

• Paedophilia
• Abortion
• Ruining the environment
• Carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments
• Allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos
• Dealing or taking drugs
• Social injustice that causes poverty or the excessive accumulation of wealth by a few

To make a couple of observations, it's good of the Catholic Church to have noticed that paedophilia's a bad thing, and I think it's worth highlighting the attack on science represented by two of the new sins – no doubt the Vatican's definition of "morally debatable scientific experiments" is broader than most.

Will the concept of 14 deadly sins take off? It seems unlikely, as the names aren't quite as catchy as Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Greed and Sloth. And does this mean there'll be a sequel to David Fincher's 1995 Oscar-nominated picture Seven, provisionally entitled Fourteen? Let's hope so...

Texas Baptists call for more fire and brimstone

For those of you who think American evangelicals already harbour an unhealthy obsession with the fires of Hell, it may come as some surprise to hear that Southern Baptist preachers are being urged to place more emphasis on warning their congregations of the ultimate dangers of sin.

At a three-day "Empower Evangelism" conference Pastor Bob Pearle, president of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention, urged preachers to up their game in warning sinners of the eternal punishment that awaits them on the other side. Speaking to Reuters, he explained the reasons behind this:

“A lot of times today, it seems that in the modern church you don’t find as much preaching on heaven and hell. [But] the whole thing that we’re about is preparing people for when they stand before God in judgement. There are still many, many Southern Baptists that faithfully preach what the Bible teaches about heaven and hell. But you have a lot of them that are a little hesitant about talking about that, about talking about sin, about talking about judgement.”

If this blog does have any Southern Baptist readers, be warned, your Sunday mornings may be about to become even less cheerful. I'd leave the kids at home if I was you...