It's Crime AND Punishment, not Crime THEN Punishment
Dostoevsky thinks you need God - I think you just need other human beings
Human beings are unique among beings in that we get to have a say in what it means to be us.
We don’t do this alone, though, not as individuals. We can declare ourselves to be all kinds of things, but it doesn’t really count unless we get some degree of buy-in from our fellow human beings.
In “Crime and Punishment” by Dostoevsky, a young student named Raskolnikov finds this out the hard way. He desires greatness for himself, Napoleon-tier greatness, and wants to climb to those heights as fast as he can. He faces many challenges in doing this - Napoleon was a world-historical talent and many people around him instantly took him seriously, and unfortunately Raskolnikov does not have comparable gifts.
What he does have is a profound willingness to assert himself over and against other human beings. Normal people abide by certain moral codes - do not kill, do not steal, etc - but Raskolnikov is a Great Man, and Great Men get to write their own rules. Great Men like Raskolnikov can kill and steal if it so suits them, to satisfy a grand ambition or a passing whim.
How does Raskolnikov know that he is a Great Man? Because Raskolnikov says so. Willingness, sheer willingness, is proof enough.
As I said at the top, though, our acts of self-creating do require some manner of buy-in from others. Raskolnikov can’t quite get that buy-in, and so he asserts his greatness by murdering his landlady (and her sister, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time). He then spends the next several hundred pages having a panic attack, his assertion of superiority landing him in a place of isolation and self-condemnation that proves inescapable.
Raskolnikov is an atheist, and believes that in the absence of God and a Divine Law that we get to make up our own rules however we want. By the end of the book, thanks to the intervention of a gold-hearted prostitute named Sonia, he repents and converts to Christianity, re-affirming the moral order he inherited. His experience illuminates an irreconcilable tension between intellectual theories that are coherent and compelling and the lived experience of putting them into action, a lived experience which - according to Dostoevsky - affirms the fundamental correctness of Chrstian faith.
For me, the book illuminates something different - it illuminates the intersubjective necessity of our existence, the fact that our minds - our language, our concepts, our conversations with ourselves - do not and cannot occur in an unsocial void. We create ourselves through self-assertion, and also we did not and cannot create ourselves from nothing and alone. We exist in a dialogue/dialectic with the cultural materials we inherited. We exist with others, and the only way to elevate ourselves is to make it worth it for others to elevate us.
The book is titled “Crime AND Punishment”, not “Crime THEN Punishment”. There is no separation between the punishment and the crime. In the story, the punishment for Raskolnikov’s crime isn’t prison, which is barely mentioned, but the isolation and suffering he endures as an immediate result of his actions.
I don’t see morality as being the arbitrary commandments of a capricious absent God - I see morality as being that which we must do if we wish to reduce suffering. We are not punished for our sins, but by them.
So: if you want to create a big and bold life for yourself, be big and bold in the contributions you want to make to others. Create ten times more value for others than what you seek to capture for yourself. We can create an incredible world, and we cannot create it alone.