Upon hearing an Eric Clapton guitar solo

[fpb]

At times like this, I really do feel sorry for atheists. One has to be grateful for artistry so miraculous, but they have nobody to be grateful to. (And don't give me any crap about "the human spirit" - that is what we owe the Murdoch press and robotic dance noise to.)

Comments

Re: WARNING: THE NEXT PERSON TO REPEAT POINTS ALREADY MADE WILL BE DELETED AND BANNED

[cosmolinguist]

Well it's good to see religion has made you such a nice person. :)

Re: WARNING: THE NEXT PERSON TO REPEAT POINTS ALREADY MADE WILL BE DELETED AND BANNED

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Where is it written that you have a right to intrude in someone else's blog, make no intelligent or novel point, show no empathy or interest, and expect polite responses?

[cosmolinguist]

It's the public internet! We have a friend in common; seeing your comments I thought I'd click on your blog... and if blogs aren't for communal discussion, what are they for? I'm sorry my opinions offend you, but they were expressed politely and it is for that reason I, perhaps foolishly, expected politeness in return. Not to mention that politeness is a good default for new people anyway, I find.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Your opinion, as such, has not enough consistency, power or aggression to offend me. I am just sick of having to answer it - yours was the third time it had been made, and a previous poster had proved remarkably repetitious. Once you actually said something that had not been said two or three times before, I answered.

And public debate does not necessarily involve politeness. Study the history of all free commonwealths from Athens to the present day, if you doubt that.

[cosmolinguist]

Your endless appeals to lofty quotes and the history of the world are endearing. I haven't heard this kind of thing since I was 18. It gives me a lovely feeling of nostalgia... Of course debate doesn't necessarily involve politeness, historically, but if that's the best reason you can come up with for treating newcomers like interlopers on your precious paean of originality...

I'm baffled as to why you expect people to have to all come up with original (much less aggressive or powerful) reasons why they don't agree with you. If that many all share the same one, I guess one might start to worry that one's firmly-held belief that atheists have no one to be grateful to might start to wobble.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That three people - so many have repeated the same answer - share one error, does very little to give that error any dignity.

[cosmolinguist]

Why is it an error to give an artist the gratitude for the effect his art has had on us?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Because he has done nothing to deserve the genius, and the work he has put in to develop it is not different from the work that ten thousand others do every day for much less impressive rewards. Apart that I argued somewhere else that half of the reality of genius lies in contemporary social realities - ah, but this is one of those quotations from lofty ancient things that bother you so much - the distribution of genius is so arbitrary that to be grateful to a man for being a genius is just as stupid as to be grateful to a man for being blond. And worse still. Just as genius is not in the control of any human being, so it is not a MORAL advantage. There are criminal geniuses - Benvenuto Cellini bragged long and loud about his detestable life - and stupid geniuses. Generation of journalists have gone away disappointed from interviewing geniuses and finding them, on almost every argument, not any better informed, wiser, or more insightful, than any other human being of moderate intelligence or diligence. Indeed, sometimes bad information and bad judgment extends to their own field: one just has to see what Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Brahms and Hugo Wolff said about the music of their time, including each other's. In this day and age, we are prone - and rightly - to criticize celebrity culture, to bad-mouth the journalistic promotion of a small number of figures of varying notoriety and the assumption that their opinions and misdemeanours will be of interest to every reader. But the admiration of the genius as a person, rather than of his/her work, is more or less in the same league.

[cosmolinguist]

But when I, or presumably you, listen to Eric Clapton's guitar solos, you are not grateful for the abstract quality you call "genius" but instead the pleasure of the emotional reactions elicited in us by his playing. Music, like genius, is not about morals. It appeals to us in a way that can cross boundaries of class, age, upbringing, language, religion, or pretty much anything we are clever enough to split ourselves into groups for. All what you say here is very interesting but like a politician you address the points you want to talk about rather than the ones you were asked about.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That is the second insult thrown at me in your last two comments, let alone that you are the one who consistently refuses to answer the points raised. You are dancing in the last chance saloon.