Rarely do I go political when I blog. And this might not necessarily be “political,” but it’s certainly thought provoking.

The following is an excerpt from an interview in this week’s MacLean’s magazine – the Canadian equivalent of Time magazine – with Margaret Atwood surrounding the issues she tackles in her new book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.

ps. I’ve never read a single solitary volume of Margaret’s, but she is venerated here as one of the great Canadian writers. Its the angle she presents this little stroke from that intrigues me so much.

Q: And you find that we not only have a debt to the environment, to the earth,

but that it’s coming due rather quickly.

A: It’s coming due. It was very interesting to me that when Louisiana was destroyed in that flood the fundamentalists were very quick to say, it’s the punishment of God on a sinful city. Now that the oil industry has been so hard hit in Galveston, are they up on their pulpits saying, God is punishing the oil industry? No, no, no! The interesting thing about the religious component, for me, is that Jesus hardly mentions sex at all. He’s pretty interested in the poor, he’s pretty interested in selling your worldly goods and storing up riches in heaven. However, religious fundamentalists have made it all about sex, and that’s like saying, ” Look at the sex and we’re just not going to talk about what you may be doing in a financial way that is sinful.”

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