How can we achieve Redemption?

Ok lets say you killed someone, you felt no remorse for the person once you killed him. But after you were sent to prison for, say, 20 years, you felt bad for that person you killed. You wished to achieve redemption. But the problem is you dont believe in any religion. How then will will you achieve redemption from a crime?

Do good works, donate, volunteer. Keep kids out of crime. Mentor, tutor. There's just so much you can do. You need to have some sort of belief or principle in life to follow. Otherwise, you're just floating around with no stability. I'm not suggesting you follow a religion, but you need some principles. I mean, when will you know if you have achieved redemption?

So people need belief in something in order to be redeemed?

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I think you're associating beliefs with religion. That's not what I meant. I'll use the word principles instead. You can use it as a measuring stick. HaiderKhan, why do you think you need redemption? Because you've taken it as a principle in your life. When will you achieve redepmtion? That depends on what your principles are. If you believe in a forgiving God, you'll achieve redemption easier. If you believe in karma, it may be harder. Like Sleepingwraith said, it's all in the head. And also in the heart.

In my opinion, redemption is psychological, as are most other emotional states. If you have no religion, and you have no-body to pray for for forgiveness, than I suppose one of the immediate reactions for somebody in desperate need of redemption would be to quickly obtain a religion. If that's not an option, you can give yourself redemption. If you have the strength to say to yourself after whatever amount of time in prison for murder, "What I did was wrong, my punishment was just, if not merciful," you will have made peace with yourself. In Woody Allen's movie "Crimes and Misdemeanors," a man who was raised in a very religious Jewish household is trying to cope withe the fact that he paid to have a harassing woman murdered. He's at first telling him-self that what he did was horrible and that God sees both the wicked and the ritious. The reasons he was beating himself up were the ideas of morals and religion. The fact that morals have been formed by lessons in the bible is irrelevant to him. In the end, he finds peace with his actions by telling himself that there's nothing to fear, that basically morality is a state of mind and the real world is a dog eat dog place. He found redemption by ignoring the concept of religion and making peace with himself. In the end, he feels no guilt, though occasional remorse, but almost all is well in his life and things have returned to normal.
That's whay I'm referring to; if you can find peace with your-self about an action, you can sleep at night and live on in emotional peace. Not that this is necessarily the proper way to go about achieving redemption, it is, for some, as effective as forgiveness from God.
To spite how we may react to how some people speak of us, we are mostly affected by how we see ourselves. When your suffering from guilt of something you did that's remained a secret, you're not suffering because people are pointing fingers at you, you're suffering because you're really teaing yourself apart inside.