Ironically, choosing Jesus over Muhammad because of the Crusades is a very Christian-centric argument.
The Islamic wars of conquest were every bit as vicious, imperialist and destructive as the Crusades; in fact, you could argue even more so, since the Crusades at least were limited in scope to the Holy Land and were, after all, taken AFTER the Muslims had conquered that land themselves.
On top of that, in terms of personal responsibility, here’s the thing; Muhammand founded his religion. Jesus didn’t. There is a much more direct line of causality between Muhammad and the infection of Islam spreading beyond Arabia than there is between Jesus and the infection of Christianity spreading beyond Israel. Christianity, really, was founded by Paul.
I’m not voting for Jesus. He was pretty cool. Unfortunately his followers went off message. So Paul should get most of the blame for any problems Christianity has caused.
But my vote’s going to be for Hitler. Based primarily on him being Hitler.
Your rules and pick, OP, lead to making Jesus a natural choice: you say to “to pick the person who had the most negative or if that’s not the case the least positive amount of influence on History.” Most negative comes first, and only if there’s no negative does one consider the positive.
Furthermore, you pick Marx not only because of his influence on Stalin, but also because of Hitler’s reaction to Marx.
Given Marx’s strident reaction against religion (and Christianity in particular), your reasoning makes it clear that we need to lay all of Marx’s faults–including Hitler’s reaction against Marx–at Jesus’s feet.
Again, we don’t consider the positive effects of the leaders, so all of the good (and it’s considerable) done by Jesus’s followers doesn’t count in his favor, any more than child labor laws (passed in the early 20th century at the behest of socialist leaders) go in Marx’s favor.
So I reluctantly have to vote Jesus, at the same time complaining about the contest rules.
As others implied, St. Paul, Constantine the Great and perhaps even Pope Urban II (all on Hart’s list) are more responsible for Christianity’s consequences than the Nazorean himself. But I’ll abstain from voting to avoid being labeled a troublemaker.
I’d already mentioned to Mr. (General?) LeMay that his criterion would be troublesome:
I shouldn’t have closed my comment with a rhetorical question as, oddly, Mr. LeMay chose to answer only it rather than my objection.
By the way, Hart shows Edward de Vere in the #31 slot, not William Shakespeare. Mr. LeMay offered to compromise by putting “Shakespeare” in quotes, but perhaps retracted the compromise in response to the annoyance of my other objection.
I think judging Hart’s list by its own criteria would be an interesting and instructive exercise. I was doubtful that Mr. LeMay’s criterion would work well, though I never predicted that the Saviour Himself would lose in the first round. :smack:
Arab and Christian are not mutually exclusive, and much of the cultural and scientific exports that came from Syria and the like were driven by the Christian Arabs. (Heck, they even gave the world Whisky, realizing that it made a better drink than a perfume.)
But point taken, that while the Roman Catholic monestaries might have preserved a lot of cultural post Roman Empire, it was the Arabs that drove scientific progress. The Orthodox sects and early Islam didn’t seem to have anywhere near the level of contempt of science as the RC Church did, and frequently encouraged it.
And while Jesus definitely had some issues (poor fig tree didn’t deserve it regardless of what lesson Jesus was trying to show his apostles and any other disciples hanging around), as others have said, Paul and the various popes are much more responsible for the evils done in his name.
Fine. I don’t want Curtis to take his ball and go home, to I’m going to vote Hitler. *
Wow. That is a weird phrase to type. I feel dirty.
I also feel as though a bunch of buzzers and flashing lights are going to go off, and Stephen Fry will appear and say “Oh, I’m sorry, but I’ll have to dock you point for an obvious answer. The correct answer is, of course, St. Paul.”
Yeah, this isn’t going to go well. CLM, you should have just reduced the criterion to “least influential” because once you started putting value judgments (“You are supposed to pick the person who had the most negative or if that’s not the case the least positive amount of influence on History.”) you’re setting yourself up to have, well, all your religious figures go first regardless of their actual impact on history.
So, if I have to vote on who had the most pernicious impact on global civilization, I’ll go with Mohammed.
If I vote based on who is wildly over-rated from that list, I’ll go with: JFK (barely “beating” Queen Isabella 1)
St Paul, for most of the aforementioned reasons. Jesus had all these nice sensible ideas and then bloody Saul of Tarsus comes along and screws it all up…
If the poll was just based on the measure of influence, it would be interesting (I’d agree with Columbus, btw). I’m not going to get into another “Christianity is the real root of all evil in the world” debate.
No one would claim Hart’s list is perfect, but his book does explain some of his odd-looking choices:
The idea that without JFK there might have been no Moon landing does not seem farfetched. Certainly the political climate over at least the last 30 years would make such a “boondoggle” impossible.
As for Queen Isabella, Hart acknowledges her husband’s influence, but gives preference to Isabella alone since, unlike with the Wright Brothers, she was clearly dominant. (I wouldn’t mind typing in excerpts from Hart’s arguments, if/when the game’s criterion is changed.)
If we were judging the candidates by influence, rather than moral values, I’d vote for the Wright brothers. There were numerous other people developing airplanes at the same time - so much so that the claim they were the first is often disputed. So if they hadn’t existed, somebody else would have done the same thing.
It’ll be interesting if we actually follow through on Curtis’ plan and vote people out based on their moral influence. Once we got past the first dozen or so, we’d be facing some unusual choices. Who, for example, had a more negative influence on history: Euclid or Planck?
Actually, given Curtis’s rationale for blaming Marx for Hitler, I’m going to change my vote from Jesus to Moses: Jesus was clearly responding to Moses, so Moses started the whole chain of events. And that vote for Moses is only because Abraham isn’t on the list.
Curtis, a humble suggestion: this thread is a trainwreck due to poorly-considered rules for the game. Perhaps you could ask for it to be closed and to start a new one with better rules, tightening up both the criteria (talking about influence rather than negative/positive) and shortening the voting period? Maybe you could the people into sets based on the digit in the ones place in their listing, thus making fairly heterogeneous sets, and people could vote one person in each set off the island per round; then at the end of the game, the winners of each set go into a set together for a final series of eliminations.
