I understand where you are coming from,.
Yet I look at the world around me,
My country and the countries I’m comfortable with, countries that I would feel safe in , that seem to be on top of the world, are Christian, the religion being a result of Jewish progenitors,
My country and the world is under assault from entities that draw their inspiration from a figure that drew his reality from Jewish writings.
Socrates ? Who really fucking cares. They talk Socrates in London. Washington and Ottawa, in their universaties but is he relevant in Cairo and Tehran ?
The scientific method is that which gave your civilization dominance over the globe for over 500 years, making your countries “on top of the world”. These ideas came to us from the Greeks and, as far as I know, there have been no other intellectual figures espousing Socrates-Plato-Aristotle ideas in any other civilization derived by Man.
However, there have been plenty of religious types who have come to prominence and it is this lack of uniqueness which causes Jesus/Paul/Mohammed/Buddha/Zoroaster/Moses/Abraham to lose, imho, the title of most significant personages in the history of the world. The Greek ideals of rationalism, doubt, and questioning of authority are unique and have no equal in world civilization (and it is in the modification and application of those ideas which gave Western Civilization control of the world), which makes Socrates et al more significant than yet another religious figure.
Nowadays we live in an actual global civilization, brought about by using the tools given us not by “Christian” teachings, but by Greeks. Given how world history developed, they are arguably the most important civilization (pro-BCE), and I chose Socrates as a representative of that civilization.
Without reading the thread first to bias me: probably Jesus.
But if you expand it to include “mythical beings,” then it would just be the idea of god.
Who cares? There’s a reasonable case to be made that without Socrates’s method of questioning things, you wouldn’t be able to type this on a computer. Computers could easily exist without Jesus’s way of forgiving things; it’s just we’d replace the “don’t be a jerk” rule with a “flog the timid” rule.
As for your remark about Islam, thirty years ago you would’ve been saying something similar about the Soviets, who were decidedly not drawing on “Jewish writings” (unless you wanna go a pretty creepy antisemitic route here). And 70 years ago it would’ve been yet another thread to the world. While we currently have a struggle between Muslim death-cults and the Western world dominating the headlines, these threats come and go, and not all of them are religiously based.
How about the concept of it being written?
Umm.. no. English law developed from Roman law, which developed from the Greeks. But that’s actually irrelevant. The key is the idea that there is a set code of conduct and rules, no longer ‘What I say goes’; laws that bind both the meek and the mighty, and that is huge.
Um- the most important to me?
Myself, without whom I would have no knowledge of the history of the world or the world or etc…
I think this is a good answer. Jesus personally wasn’t very influential at all - it’s the mythology built around him and in his name that has actually had an effect on the world, and Paul was a central figure behind that. Jesus could turn out to never have actually existed and the effect would have been the same.
The same goes for God, Moses, Abraham and other fictional people; the “significant person” would be their creators, not them. And for most of them there is no one, main creator to give the credit to.
EDIT: Oops, necroed due to a link from another thread.
How about Genghis Khan? His Empire had an enormous affect on most of the world from Eastern Europe to East Asia, and it’s also likely that he’s an ancestor of millions of living people.
nm… ZOMBIES, RUN!!!
A good contender, although his effects are even harder to measure than that of religious leaders since he didn’t leave behind any direct legacy of “Genghis Khanism” that can be observed.