"Penance? You'll do that anyway. You're not Catholic, Mr. Basnight?"
* * * * * * * * * *
Sometimes making oneself a better person is too hard. It's easier to just take a dozen lashes with a whip and be done with the guilt of your sin. But as Drave correctly points out, atonement and penance are not two variables in different equations; they're values on the same side of an equation balancing out the other variable, guilt. Lew will rightly punish himself for having hurt his wife which will probably lessen the amount of time atonement will take. Without penance, atonement just takes the standard amount of time that needs to pass before grief isn't in control anymore. You really don't have to do any work; time will do it all for you!
"You're not Catholic"
I don't know enough about Catholicism or any other Christian denomination to understand why Drave brings this up. I think maybe it's because Catholics rely on penance to atone for their sins? Having to say a bunch of Hail Marys and rubbing rosaries and such? While protestants don't care about ritual penance so much as just repenting to Jesus? Seriously, this shit really is nuts to me, a person raised areligious who mostly learned about these things through television, Sunday Christian puppet television shows, and a few courses in college.
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