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.
There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.
The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark. When you look closely, the twenty-four hour day is framed into a moment; the still-life of the jerky amphetamine world. That woman-a pieta. Those men, rough angels with an unknown message. The children holding hands, spanning time. And in every still-life, there is a story, the story that tells you everything you need to know.
Most men are scantily nourished on a modicum of happiness and a number of empty thoughts which life lays on their plates. They are kept in the road of life through stern necessity by elemental duties which they cannot avoid.
The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.
We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.
The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.
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