Atonement

I've been making my way through Ian McEwan's ouvre of late. I read Atonement a few years back. I read On Chesil Beach this summer. I finished Saturday about two months ago. And I'm reading Amsterdam now. I was clicking around on the internets and found this McEwan quote, which I thought I'd post up in light of Willard Mitt Romney's Holy War:

Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It's a little easier if you've got a god to forgive you.