Want to absolutely shock people?

Take words like “guilt”, “penance” and “mortification of the flesh” seriously.

The outraged reactions in the comboxes from atheists, fundamentalists and moralistic therapeutic deists are all quite funny.

The “experiment” the article talks about seems to me to be highly dubious and dodgy, but the notion that, yes, penance does involve denying the desires of the flesh is, after all, something that every serious religious tradition in the world affirms. Over against it, we have the radical stupidity of our age, which looks straight at the colossal crimes of the 20th and 21st centuries and concludes there is no such thing as guilt, nor any need for spiritual discipline.