"It is not necessary to be religious to possess wisdom and good conduct. But if you cannot distinguish between good and evil, it is not religion that you lack: it is the conscience of what it means to be human." There are crimes before which words seem futile. Two young women, barely out of adolescence for one, on the threshold of adulthood for the other. Two lives shattered. Two families confronted with a pain that nothing can truly erase. They should have known plans, studies, love, travel, the simple joys of life. They knew violence, abuse, and ultimately, death. One was found bound. The other was abandoned in bushes. Behind these facts are above all two human beings whose lives have been stolen. A terrible question imposes itself: how can a human being come to consider that another human being deserves neither respect, nor dignity, nor even to live? Our society often likes to explain morality through religion. We speak of faith, prayers, places of worship, Christian, Muslim, traditional or other values. We rightly remind ourselves that religions generally teach respect for life, compassion, self-control and love of neighbor. But these tragedies force us to go further. For religion cannot be merely a veneer applied to a personality devoid of conscience. One can know prayers without knowing compassion. One can regularly attend a place of worship and continue to humiliate, exploit or harm others. One can speak of God while forgetting what it means to respect His creation. Morality is not measured by the number of prayers uttered, but by how we treat human beings when no one is watching. Moral conscience should never be outsourced to religion. Faith can help build a conscience. It can provide guidance, nourish hope and remind each person of the value of life. Before being believers or non-believers, we are human beings. And this humanity imposes on us a first obligation: do not do to others what we would never want to suffer ourselves. This is precisely the meaning of this Malagasy wisdom: the conscience of humanity in each of us must precede any religious affiliation. To know that the other suffers. To understand that a "no" means no. To know that a body never belongs to us. To understand that physical strength, authority, money or social position give no one the right to dispose of another human being. This is the beginning of morality. And this morality must be learned very early. It begins in the family, in the way we teach our boys to regard girls and women. It continues at school, where education should not only transmit knowledge, but also teach respect, responsibility and self-control. It is strengthened in society, when we refuse to trivialize violence, sexual assault, humiliation or discourse that presents women as objects. For a society that tolerates small acts of violence sometimes ends up discovering, too late, extreme violence. We must also have the courage to remind ourselves that the victim is never responsible for the crime they suffer. Their clothing, their time of departure, their behavior, their surroundings or their choices never justify an assault. Responsibility belongs entirely to the one who decides to cross the line, to impose their will and to deny the dignity of the other. Faced with such abject crimes, justice must obviously do its work. The perpetrators must be identified, tried and punished in accordance with the law. But criminal justice, however essential, intervenes after the tragedy! Yes, the real battle is also fought before! The two young women whose lives have just been brutally cut short must not become mere names in the chronicle of news items. Their death must question us and make us ask ourselves: what kind of human being am I when I am alone facing the temptation to do harm?