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

[fpb.livejournal.com]

And all this because, if you please, I objected to your notion that people who do not have the immense success of Eric Clapton obviously had not worked as hard!

[cosmolinguist]

Of course effort is no guarantee of success. I did say, originally, that people and fortuitous circumstances surrounding a person will impact their chances there.

But I never said Clapton had to be successful to be worth feeling grateful to or for; that was your idea. I have listened to lovely music by people you'll never hear of; I feel grateful that I have been able to do that, entirely apart from the fact that they have no more commercial success than session musicians and many have to have day jobs. Still as artists they are as successful in my eyes as Eric Clapton because my response to them is at least (and often far more so) favorable than my reaction to him.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I am now extremely angry. ...Clapton had to be successful to be worth feeling grateful to or for; that was your idea. THAT IS A LIE and the total opposite of everything I said. There is nothing whatsoever in any of my answers to imply that financial success is any measure of artistic value, and in fact I quoted the unacknowledged giant David Olney as a classic case of unrecognized genius. I expect an immediate apology.