I’m willing to discuss it.
Other than Moses, who on the list do you believe is a fictional character?
Hitler’s fictional, too. Part of the holocaust conspiracy.
Homer is probably fictional. So he should be out D’oh
Yeah, but i’m gonna take that answer to mean “the guy who wrote down the Odyssey and Iliad” and that guy certainly didn’t hurt anyone- he goes down in like… top 20 or so for me probably.
The guys who created religions though on the other hand…
Well, I know Homer wasn’t the one who led to canceling Prom and then reinstating it for a Teenage Lesbian.
Here’s what we have for Round 2 so far:
Moses - 7 votes
Mohammed - 5 votes
Adolf Hitler - 3 votes
St Paul - 1 vote
Ts’ai Lun - 1 vote
Lao Tzu, for sure, Probably Mahavira too. Homer in any way except as the author(s) of the epics. Essentially “Homer” would just be a stand in for the influence of the books themselves. Not sure if that’s a strong enough criterion.
Of course Homers fictional, Wiki says so so it must be true.
According to Martin West, “Homer” is “not the name of a historical poet, but a fictitious or constructed name.”
&
If Moses gets thrown out for being fictional then Mohammed is in the lead for rejection.
I’m afraid to sound like a dumbass but I’ll ask anyway: Big M’s fictional? I always thought that, unlike Moses, for example, there was real evidence for his existence? Like evidence of the wars he waged, etc?
Defining a real person of possibly unknown name that way might be fine if one could assume the Iliad and the Odyssey were written by the same person, but many find that quite unlikely. Julian Jaynes famously uses the two books as “before” and “after” evidence for his conjectured change in human consciousness.
I’m ok with just dumping Homer as fictional.
I think he just meant that Muhammed is the current leader in votes after the fictions are cleared away.
Exactly
Muhammed is doomed!!!
Interesting that the first two to be eliminated may be in Hart’s Top Three! I suppose Isaac Newton will be offed immediately after that; he’s the father of modern science without which we wouldn’t have political talk shows on TV, Muzak in elevators, or phone calls from telemarketers.
I hope your not implying that some posters didn’t read the whole list :mad:
I’m torn between St. Paul and Minneapolis.
Whoops, wait a minute…wrong thread. :eek:
St Paul again.
I didn’t vote last round since I wasn’t sure if the rules were going to change or not. Since they’re not, I’m going to go with St. Paul.
I would vote for Mo, except for the fear of jihad.
Mahavira is almost certainly a real person; his father, the Lachuar king Siddhartha (not that Siddhartha) is known from several non-mythological accounts, as is Mahavira. Obviously, the stuff about being bathed in milk by the gods and performing miracles is probably fiction.
Simon Bolivar. Way overrated.