One of the great benefits of organised religion is that you can be forgiven your sins, which must be a wonderful thing. I mean, I carry my sins around with me, there's nobody there to forgive them.
Interpretation
Organized religion offers a path to forgiveness, alleviating the burden of personal sins.
Kingsley Amis reflects on the nature of sin and forgiveness within organized religion, highlighting a key benefit of such systems: the potential for individuals to find absolution from their wrongdoings. He contrasts this with the personal struggle of living with one's sins, suggesting that without the framework of organized religion, individuals may feel isolated in their guilt and unable to escape its weight.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the psychological benefits of faith.
When I find someone I respect writing about an edgy, nervous wine that dithered in the glass, I cringe. When I hear someone I don't respect talking about an austere, unforgiving wine, I turn a bit austere and unforgiving myself. When I come across stuff like that and remember about the figs and bananas, I want to snigger uneasily. You can call a wine red, and dry, and strong, and pleasant. After that, watch out.
Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence.
Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust.
He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.
God is very merciful to those whom He sees struggling heart and soul for spiritual realization. But remain idle, without any struggle, and you will see that His grace will never come.
If we possessed a thorough knowledge of all the parts of the seed of any animal (e.g. man), we could from that alone, be reasons entirely mathematical and certain, deduce the whole conformation and figure of each of its members, and, conversely if we knew several peculiarities of this conformation, we would from those deduce the nature of its seed.
We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.
Man is nothing; he hath a free will to go to hell, but none to go to heaven, till God worketh in him" and "you dishonour God by denying election. You plainly make salvation depend, not on God's 'free grace' but on Man's 'free will.'
I was a Muslim once, remember, and it was when I was most devout that I was most full of hate.
The world is becoming an immense military base, and that base is becoming a mental hospital the size of the world. Inside the nuthouse, which ones are crazy?
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