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.
A subject which at first glance seems quite removed from the undeclared concern of the book can encapsulate that concern.
The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.
Human beings are curious by nature.
Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty.
It is not the being seen of men that is wrong, but doing these things for the purpose of being seen of men. The problem with the hypocrite is his motivation.
People ought to fight to keep their law as to defend the city s walls.
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