Paper Details

Name: Sohan Singh
Country: India

Year: 2015
Volume: Volume-2, Issue-1 (January-June)
Page Number: 14-24

Confession is regarded as necessary for attaining divine/social forgiveness or appeasing the burdened conscience. In the Old Testament, the Lord, God said to Amram‟s son, Moses: “Say to the people of Israel, when a man or a woman commits any of the sins that men commit by breaking faith with the Lord, that person is guilty, he shall confess his sin which he has committed” (Num V.6). If in the ecclesiastical terms, it is “breaking faith with the Lord”, then it is necessitated by “breaking faith” with the society.
Encyclopedia Brittanica(Vol.6) cites another interpretation of confession- “an extra-judicial statement acknowledging guilt of an offence”. The voluntary confession, in most jurisdictions, must be corroborated by other evidence before a defendant may be convicted, which can relate to the authenticity of the occurrence of the crime. It also means ”self-humiliation and abusement by the acknowledgement of sin”, and immediately the image presented to the mind is of a forlorn individual struggling to appease not only the deity and society but also his own conscience. Self-accusation appeases the personal and the collective conscience.