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.
We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.
The characteristic feature of modernity is criticism: what is new is set over and against what is old, and it is this constant contrast that constitutes the continuity of tradition.
The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory.
Every moment of the night Forever changing places And they put out the star-light With the breath from their pale faces
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
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