Seems reasonable, doesn’t it? Until you learn the history.
Jesus told his apostles that they would have the authority to forgive sins or to withold the forgiveness of God. From the very earliest days of the Church, that forgiveness involved a genuine confession to God in the presence of a priest/apostle.
Christian teaching is BOTH about Divine Revelation and human comprehension of it. You can’t just substitute the latter for the former. Given that Jesus established a ministry for the apostles of forgiving or NOT forgiving sins, we need to comprehend why he did that.
Contrary to the attitude underlying a lot of Protestant ideas, humans are NOT simply spirits occupying a corrupt flesh in a corrupt world. We are a union of body and spirit. What we say and do in the flesh MATTERS. God established confession to a priest because he is our Creator and understands fully how we work. He knows that actually verbally speaking what we have done to ears we can see affects us differently than a mere mental acknowledgement of our misdeeds. He also knows that when we hear with our own ears the words of absolution that it means more than a general promise made in a book.
Basically the very reasons you are reluctant to do it are WHY God established the requirement!
