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The kind shepherds over at Flamingo Road Church (grab their daily podcast) in Florida have created a religious website with a twist–ivescrewedup.com is a website on which you can confess your sins and, assuming it is approved by the moderator-ministers, your confession will then appear for the world to see, along with your home town.

The first thing about ivescrewedup.com, which struck me almost immediately, was this: on one hand, the amazingly slick and graphic-heavy website, and on the other, the amazing lack of literacy amongst the flock posting their confessions online. If anything, this website definitely confirms the sad relationship between ignorance and religion, as well as the fact that evangelical churches continue to use the latest technology to proselytize to a media-hungry and gullible audience.

Amongst the litany of grief and suffering were quite a few truly poignant stories, some very tragic indeed, such as the following from someone in South Africa:

I was raped and have HIV. I cannot tell anyone this. My family will hate me. I think I am pregnant. Lord, please send me friend who will understand.

As with any website, there are also the odd tongue-in-cheek pseudo-confessions:

dear lord, im so glad you got the internet, you really are everywhere! now you have restored my belief in you and i will serve you as long as i can

Of course, the other thing to consider is that none of this is actually checked for veracity. In fact, any of the confessions might well be nothing more than the creative fiction of bored teenagers. After all, the main element of Catholic confession, namely atoning for the sin in some ritual fashion, is conspicuously absent in this outpouring-only .com non-denominational confessional. Also, many of the confessions on ivescrewedup.com seem to be more pleas for help than confessions of transgression–perhaps fare better suited for GroupHug, or even the intervention of a trained professional. Ultimately, ivescrewedup.com is an interesting addition to the internet landscape, but it’s more an exercise in occasionally-frightening, flashy evangelical web-marketing than any sort of groundbreaking means of freeing the human spirit to allow communication with some sort of god.

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For those of you concerned that your sex toys, while adequate in terms of size and durability, lack the desirable quality of pissing off religious people, Divine Interventions‘ line of utterly blasphemous (and delightfully orgasmic) dildoes should allay your fears. With names such as ‘God’s Immaculate Rod,’ the suction-cup enhanced ‘Diving Nun‘ (stick it to your wall and bend over for that authentic trip down Sunday school memory lane), and the ‘Jackhammer Jesus‘ (a ’savior-on-the-cross’ motif dildo of truly messianic proportions), Divine Interventions’ product line is sure to delight anyone you’d actually want to bang, and horrify the people that secretly only enjoy missionary.
Lest you assume that the product line at Divine Interventions is entirely blasphemous, consider the ‘Baby Jesus Buttplug,’ a product clearly intended to help Catholic women maintain their virginity, while keeping Jesus inside themselves.
Even necrophiliacs or just the morbidly-curious out there can get off with Divine Interventions, thanks to the ‘Grim Reaper,’ a seriously detailed model of everyone’s favorite harbinger of doom…except for the addition of two gigantic balls where his ass should be.
But if there’s one thing that sets Divine Interventions apart, it’s their haiku page, a fountainhead of creativity which allows budding poets like ‘Stacy’ to express themselves in truly human ways:

I just found Jesus
Sinning never felt so divine
He converts my ass
- Stacy
Friday, December 2nd, 2005