From a non-Christian perspective, since the whole "died for my sins" thing is as completely foreign to me as are the Greek and Roman gods: I believe that guilt is a good thing. If you do something wrong, you should do you best to rectify it. A person has no business forgiving him or herself - the only one who can forgive you is the wronged party. There is nothing wrong with living with a certain degree of guilt - if you did something wrong, you should continue to feel guilty. A certain degree of guilt does not interfere with living your life, and as a matter of fact helps prevent you from doing wrong again. Of course there is a huge difference between, say, snapping at a coworker and shooting half a dozen people in a convenience store robbery. I don't know how someone who did the latter could live with himself, but probably someone with a conscience wouldn't have committed that crime in the first place. If you feel so guilty that you agonize over it constantly, then that may be a sign that you have not done everything in your power to make it up to the wronged party. If a person killed someone while driving drunk, it would not be possible to make it up to the victim's family, but at least the person could stop drinking and talk to school groups about the horrors that can result from driving drunk. There is usually something you can do to at least partially remediate the situation, ranging from a simple apology to devoting your life to a cause.

TR,

Thank you for your reply. I just finished a long reply but for some reason it did not post- sorry.

Someone