I always try to apologize when I am wrong, but apologizing is difficult, people and lives move on, and the people we need to apologize to, and things we need to apologize about, are often far away before we get the chance. Hence guilt. Yet it is wrong to burden ourselves with guilt, because then we don't give of our best now., which is something else we have to apologize for.

The church gives a sky fairy who we can do all our apologizing to, without that we can only use the the guilt as incentive to do better, which is perhaps a better way.