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.
Anything in any way beautiful derives its beauty from itself and asks nothing beyond itself. Praise is no part of it, for nothing is made worse or better by praise.
Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.
Men and women, old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine
I learned not to fear infinity, The far field, the windy cliffs of forever, The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow, The wheel turning away from itself, The sprawl of the wave, The on-coming water.
My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.
How we think about the world and - perhaps even more importantly - how we narrate it have a massive significance, therefore, a thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes.
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