Confession

I joined in a "discussion" on Travis' blog yesterday on the journalist's privilege of not revealing sources.

Travis said:
I don’t have a firm opinion on Miller, but I lean towards the stance that jailing her is the right thing. At the federal level, journalists do not have special privileges, and I think that at no level SHOULD they have special privileges. If we’re going to give the state power to compel testimony from folks about crimes, and if we’re going to make it a crime to learn classified information on the job and then leak it, then we should jail everyone who is witness to leaked information and then fails to testify about it (with the obvious legal exceptions: testimony against self or a spouse, and testimony by a priests or lawyer who learned the information in confidence).

To which I replied:
I agree with everything you wrote if you replace the word “Journalist” everywhere with “Journalists and Priests”. Otherwise I think you are still make exceptions for non-governmental employees, just arguing over which group holds your special interest.

The logic being that, until it's proven that a) god exists and b) priests are actually his representatives, they should not be granted any special rights that the rest of the citizens don't have.

Afterwards I was thinking about this and wondered what religions, other than Catholicism and it's minor variants, have confession as an integral part of their services. An hours work poking around the web (I am on vacation this week) came up with one and only one other established religion that uses confession to control their flock:

Scientology

At this point, even I won't comment any further except to say if you know of another that isn't a version of Catholicism (e.g. Greek Orthodox), shoot me a mail. Please. I need to be less appalled by this than I current am.