The wages of sin are debts

An interesting piece by Margaret Atwood on the spiritual implications of debt. She draws a parallel between sin and debt. Lord's Prayer Anyone?

Between the 1940s and now, the search engine has providentially come into being, and I've recently been trolling around on the web, looking for an explanation of the discrepancy between the two translations of these Lord's Prayer lines. If you do this yourself you'll find that “debts” was used by John Wycliffe in his 1395 translation and “trespasses” in Tyndale's 1526 version. “Trespasses” reappears in the 1549 English Book of Common Prayer, though the King James 1611 translation of the Bible reverts to “debts”. The Latin Vulgate uses the word for “debts”. But it's interesting to note that in Aramaic, the Semitic language that was spoken by Jesus, the word for “debt” and the word for “sin” are the same. So you could translate this word as “Forgive us our debts/sins,” or even “our sinful debts”; though no translator has chosen to do this yet.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/article4833814.ece