The confessional should be unsealed!

[Outrider]

'Unmeasurable'  is not 'unimportant'.. That is the basic mistake people enamored with scientism make.

Unmeasurable, alone, is no unimportant.  Unmeasurable and unfalsifiable, that's unimportant. The effect being attributed to whatever it is - life, consciousness, quantum fluctuations - isn't unimportant, but unmeasurable, unfalsifiable claims about the nature of it.. that is.

O.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Sriram,

'Unmeasurable'  is not 'unimportant'.. That is the basic mistake people enamored with scientism make.

Unmeasurability alone doesn't make something unimportant - non-investigabiity though does because a non-investigable truth claim is just a guess, and there as many of those as there are people to have them, you included.   

[Nearly Sane]

I never knew the confessional has so much in it.

[Walter]

I never knew the confessional has so much in it.

however, I must confess I've never been to one 😝

[Dicky Underpants]

I am of the opinion that if someone confesses to a priest a serious crime, they should be obliged by law to inform the police. Giving the miscreant a few hail Mary's is not going to absolve them of their wrong doing. For instance, if the RCC had cracked down on paedophile priests and reported them to the police instead of keeping the knowledge of their misdeeds in house, they would not have been free to abuse again as many of them did.

I don't think the priests are obliged to 'absolve' them, particularly when it comes to the most serious crimes. And maybe a good priest would advise the offender to give themselves up. If such people have taken the step of going to the confessional, it does indicate some kind of moral conscience. I doubt that a murderous psychopath would give a monkey's toss.

[bluehillside Retd.]

DU,

I don't think the priests are obliged to 'absolve' them, particularly when it comes to the most serious crimes. And maybe a good priest would advise the offender to give themselves up. If such people have taken the step of going to the confessional, it does indicate some kind of moral conscience. I doubt that a murderous psychopath would give a monkey's toss.

It may indicate a moral conscience, but the problem (or rather one of them) is that a ne'er-do-well could see doing penance in the confessional as sufficient to atone for his crimes and so not trouble with the really rather disobliging business of police, courts, prison etc. After all, if a priest tells him he's now right with god why bother with the rest?

There was incidentally a nuanced and articulate priest here (or possibly on the old BBC mb) a while back who said that, even if someone in the confessional told him that he'd put a bomb in a primary school and wouldn't tell the cops still the priest wouldn't shop him to the cops. That seemed to me - and still seems to me - to be an example of the utterly morally corrupting effect that thinking there to be a higher authority can have.     

[jeremyp]

If priests start telling the police about confessions, people will stop confessing to them. You haven't really thought this through, have you?

So you're a priest and somebody just confessed to you that they have committed multiple murders. They are a serial killer. What do you do?

Suppose you keep quiet and there's another murder. It's obvious from the context it was your confessee. What do you do? Bear in mind you now have a murder on your conscience. I wouldn't be able to live with that. I'd have to turn the murderer in to the police.

[Roses]

So you're a priest and somebody just confessed to you that they have committed multiple murders. They are a serial killer. What do you do?

Suppose you keep quiet and there's another murder. It's obvious from the context it was your confessee. What do you do? Bear in mind you now have a murder on your conscience. I wouldn't be able to live with that. I'd have to turn the murderer in to the police.

A priest should stick two fingers up to his church's dogma, and do the right thing by turning them in.