DO WE NEED ROMAN CATHOLIC STYLE CONFESSION?

The Catholic Church has priests forgiving sins on God’s behalf as if they were the one offended, as if they were God!
  
The Council of Trent taught infallibly that Jesus, “has left priests to represent him as presiding judges, to whom Christ’s faithful are to submit all mortal sins into which they have fallen, in order that they may pronounce sentence of sins remission or retention in virtue of the power of the keys” (14th Session, Chapter 5). It is Catholic teaching that the absolution given by priests is a judicial act – actus judicialis. It is an act that involves the priest making a judgment so it cannot be given without confession of individual sins (page 13, Penance Sacrament of Reconciliation). The Church isn’t consistent with its own teaching. Somebody comes in confessing that God cannot trust them and neither can the Church. So how can the priest be expected to pardon them just because they confess and say they are sorry. Some people like confessing – it is like a boast to them. So what should happen is people confess and prove their sorrow to the priest before absolution. In a court of law, a judicial system cannot simply take people’s word for things. A system that does is not being judicial.
 
Allowing confession without absolution which has happened in the Vatican II Church is anti-Catholic and heretical. It denies the meaning of the sacrament. If the sacrament is judicial no exceptions can be made to the confession rule under any circumstances no matter how grave. It is wrong for the state to grant pardons to people just because it won’t make a bigger effort to provide fair trials for them. It denigrates their victims. And so it is with the Church.
 
The real reason the popes allow absolution without confession in mission countries is because their rules about priests having to be unmarried males who follow the mind of the pope completely means that only a tiny number of dysfunctional men can become priests so there aren’t enough to go round to listen to all the sins. They know this looks bad so they pretend to care about allowing the forgiveness of sins to be provided. The power of controlling these men and making sure they have nothing in life to mean anything to them but the Church is too much for the popes to resist.
 
Incidentally, the ashes dished out on Ash Wednesday and which are placed on the heads of penitents in Church by the priest are a sign of penance and repentance and the priests put them on the heads of people they know who are living in sin or whatever and have no intention of giving up their sin. The priest could announce that only people who are sincere can come up and if anybody is considered insincere they will be refused and have only themselves to blame for they were warned. 
 
UNHEALTHY TO BRING UP THE PAST?
 
Is it unhealthy to bring up the past in the confessional? Yes for it is not about bringing things up that bother you now to heal you. It is about bringing up things because they are allegedly evil and sick and have to forgiven and that forgiveness may do nothing for how you feel.
 
In the world of therapy we would learn, that if you have made bad "choices" in the past, they can tarnish your life now. You need to work on inner healing. You need to judge, "Is it better to deal with those mistakes now and bring it all up again or not?" It is not necessarily better to rake up the past for the sake of healing even if that is still hurting you. Perhaps it is not the past that is hurting you but your raking it up and going over it again in your mind. Perhaps the process of feeling and facing it again will be more painful than trying to heal it. Perhaps the pain has its own benefits that outweigh the problems. Perhaps it will be neither good or bad to bring it up.
 
The key thing to remember in all that is that it is all up to you.
 
Catholicism says that it is not. It says God has been offended by your sinful choices and you need to drag it all up for his sake and not your own. Even if there are benefits you must do it for him not for you. Thus we see the religion is unhealthy. The notion of God puts pressure on a person.
 
The Church says that all past sin can tarnish your relationship with God so it needs to be dealt with. It says that if the sin is serious it needs to be brought up again because it WILL tarnish your life and your potential for God and your connection with God. Hence the need for going to confession.
 
This implies that you must bring up your sins and the fact that it is unhealthy at times to bring up the past is dismissed in the name of religion. Disgraceful!
 
Bringing up the past if bad in itself is bad in the confessional for other reasons as well.
 
WHO WOULD WANT TO CONFESS!
 
Confession only helped those who were conditioned to need to tell their sins. But they should not have been conditioned to have this need in the first place. Confession does not really help anybody. I saw how crafty the priests were in presenting it as a form of therapy! Confession is too brief for that. Feedback and follow-up sessions do not take place. The deceit of the priests is appalling.
 
For some, confession is about getting relief from a guilt that should not exist in the first place for the person has been manipulated to experience it. And this relief should be temporary for the guilt is irrational. Confession is not anything like therapy. Moreover, its purpose is absolution not psychological transformation. It is about theory not fact. It is about religion.
 
Those who can bear to go to confession may see it as the priest wanting to save them from what sin does and can do to them. In fact, the prime concern is getting the sin forgiven. It is about that. Even if it is hoped that this forgiveness will help and change you. that is not the purpose. It is really about pleasing God. The Christian faith is not about making others happy and caring for them for their own sake but for God's.
 
Sin and the destructiveness of sin are not one and the same thing. They are separate and distinct. The flu is not the same as its symptoms. The Church ignores this truth and manipulates the people.
 
The Church says we all have a psychological need to go to confession (Confession: Why We Go?, page 9, Faith Pamphlets, Surrey, 1975). Go to confession? Really? There are other ways to confess if you don’t want to have anything to do with a priest. Not everybody wants to confess things that worry their consciences.

Confession is degrading because it is a man telling you God says you must change your life or rot in Hell forever and that man cannot prove that you deserve Hell or even that there is such a place and still he says you do. You must be very bad if you deserve that and worse than a murderer so you need very strong proof before you can let anybody treat you like that.
 
How could you feel good that a man who feels that he is out of the danger of Hell is absolving you from Hellfire? We like to feel as good as everybody else and don’t like people who parade their virtues in any way.
 
CONFESSION AND HATING SIN
 
The Church says sin is the greatest and most despicable evil of all. The sin is the sinner. A sin shows what kind of person you are. The confessional and its placebo is based on the lie that you can love the sinner and hate the sin. How can you especially when you are to regard it as abominable?

CONCLUSION:
 
Confession is demeaning and is nonsensical. It encourages sinners to sin on for it is so hypocritical that it cannot have any other effect.
 
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