万花筒 Kaleidoscope 2007-05-30&31, 忏悔的新方式

Bless me, father, for I have sin.

Most Christians 1 are familiar with traditional means of confession 2, in a booth or face-to-face. Now, the internet highway may be the road to salvation 3.

Bearing your soul is just a mouse click away. At this website, ivescrewedup.com, you can type away your sins.

"You know, I mean, you've got a 19-year-old that's struggling with pornography on the web and wants to put it down but doesn't know how."

Troy Gramling is lead pastor 4 at the nondenominational Flamingo 5 Road Church in Cooper City, Florida.

"No matter how much you or I have screwed up our relationships with God, no long matter how long ago we actually let go of the hand of Christ and kind of walked away to live our own way, it doesn't matter."

Pastor Gramling and several other church members decided 6 the internet was a way to reach out.

"You know, I would look at more we're leveraging 7 it. You know, in other words, that's the world we live in, as people are doing life on the web. And so instead of trying to fight that, we want to leverage 8 that."

But they never expected the reaction. More than 1,000 mea culpas have poured in since the site went up on Easter Sunday. All are kept anonymous 9. Church leaders screen them before they are posted. For Ashley Iodice, a church member, it was the perfect form.

"I mean, you can take your laptop and you can just be free to write whatever you want, whatever you feel and you don't have to worry about someone judging you, or someone look at you wrong. So I think that's actually the appeal. That was appeal for me."

One person confessed to stealing $15,000 from family members. Another wrote, "I hate myself, the way I look, the way I think, the way I feel. Everything!" The most common confessions 10, you probably guessed, deal with sins of the flesh.

"It seems like the ones people struggle with the most, most are their, as the sexual realm of their life. You know, whether be pornography, whether be adultery. Em, all those kinds of things are what keep coming up and up, over and over again."

There's no way to know for sure which are real and which are jokes. But pastor Gramling says he's confident the ones they post are legit. Some are more painful than others, like this one Gramling believes is from a soldier.

"I killed him only because he shot at me first. The worst was when I buried my K-Bar all the way to the hilt in this guy's throat. I looked into his eyes and as the adrenaline went away I found myself whispering, 'I'm sorry' as the life escaped from his eyes."

"And so it's cool that there are people going, it's cool that we're getting these confessions. But it's, em, it hurts you as you read them because you know there are a lot of people that are hurting and nobody knows."

It is a refreshing 11 approach to saving souls says religious studies professor Daniel Alvarez.

"There're many people out there who want to express themselves spiritually. They're afraid to go to the church but here's the church coming out to them. That's vintage Christianity and that should be celebrated 12."

Vintage but not completely original. In the movie "Bruce Almighty," actor Jim Carey plays God, and is quickly fed up with the amount of e-mail he's getting.

Unlike Carey, who sends a blanket e-mail response, the Flamingo Road Church doesn't respond at all, believing that if your confession is sincere, God is listening or in this case reading, and most importantly, forgiving.

John Zarrella, CNN, Cooper City, Florida.

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mea culpa: An acknowledgment of a personal error or fault.