Tonight I watched the drama Blue Bloods for the first time this season, and the protagonist played by Donnie Wahlberg got a tip from his wife (a nurse at a hospital) who had overheard a dying man’s last confession. He sought up the priest who had given him “last rites” and asked him for more details since it was relevant to finding the dead man’s murderer. The priest refused to tell him, indicating the “sanctity of confession” as the reason why he wouldn’t cooperate and help the detective solve the case. Later on, the priest himself gets shot but when Wahlberg visits him in the hospital he refuses to tell him who it was or why. Wahlberg gets frustrated and says, “who/what are you protecting, now?” He leaves without any support from the priest.

            The other main theme of the episode today was the question of revenge and mercy, which, true to good writers, played out in two separate plot lines, as the young rookie cop acted out of protocol in order to pursue a man who had robbed his grandfather, but ended up pulling him up as he was in danger of falling off a building, saving his life; and in the other, a mob father sent a tip to the police commissioner about a hit in order that his son might be arrested, to save him from a life of crime by cutting it short with a jail sentence and rehabilitation boot-camp. Both carry obvious questions for the audience a la “what would you have done?” But though it received less screen time, the third “WWYHD” question about whether it’s always the right thing to do, to keep a secret, eclipsed the other two.

            Why should confessions be secret? There is no place in the Bible where you will find the rule that says that secrets told to clergy are forbidden from ever being revealed. Nor will you find a verse that says that churchmen can withhold life-or-death information from state officials simply because it was given to them by means of a “holy confession.” And if you think about it honestly, why would God want you to lie by omission which could lead to someone getting hurt? When I look into the Bible, I find repeated commands to tell the truth and be honest, but I don’t find any that say that lies, white lies, or refusing to tell the truth when doing so can lead to someone getting killed is ever acceptable, much less the right thing to do.

            Atheists and people of diverse religious opinions that don’t resemble christianity are right to point to supposed “fathers” whose ponderous moral ethic does not even rise to the level of a typical child. Children know that it’s right to tell the truth, and withholding the truth makes them feel guilty. The unwise are wise when they point out that religion has become a cover-up for doing evil, a rationalization for doing things you know are wrong. When your own internal moral compass is more ethical than the strange idea of a deity which you worship, then you are better than your deity. If you, being a mere man, are not a god, then a deity which has a lower morality than you cannot be god over you. You are better than what you worship. Shouldn’t you be worshiping something that makes you into a better person, not a worse one?

            Let the reader not be mistaken. I’m not advocating atheism, but I’m advocating a respect for the inherent accuracy of every person’s “hypocrite-alarm,” which alerts them to instances of religious perversity that makes beasts out of men. Granted, the unbelieving world registers many “false positives,” but they miss very few of the true negatives. In the case of the man-made doctrine of confession, I stand with the masses and assert that any religious doctrine that asserts that withholding the truth is honorable to God is not a doctrine that comes from God. True Christianity, as found in the Bible by all who open their eyes to it and dare to read, never makes people into worse people than they were before they became believers. Any time a person becomes more evil after joining a religion, you can be sure that that religion is false.

Please share your thoughts below.

Poll Question: What do you think about the rule that priests in the Roman and Orthodox Catholic Churches can't divulge the secrets of confessions that people have given to them on the grounds that such secrets are "holy?"