I think that it is the first person to ever try milk!
What do you guys think?
I vote for brave, brave Sir Robin.
does “bravest” mean the person who did the stupidest thing and survived?
That’d be me
What about the first person to eat an egg?
The first person to try shark’s fin soup - after all, he had to get the fin, first.
Listen to me
I’m sure you’ll agree
The bravest man in history
was neither soldier or champion of law
but the first to devour an oyster raw.
To post a more serious reply…
Jesus Christ.
Whether you believe he was the Son of God or not–you gotta realize that this was a mere carpenter–a man of humbleness, but with faith so great that he marched willingly to his own death for sake of not just his people, but for all of humanity.
To me–that takes a great amount of bravery.
the forst person to pick a mushroom out of a turd and eat it.
The first person to post an IMHO thread in GQ.
Many not the bravest (there’s a lot of people who did stuff that we probably never even heard off) but he must be up there in military terms.
How about Mohammed Atta? Bill Maher thinks so.
I object to the notion that Jesus Christ was “brave”. If he truly was the Son of G.O.D., that means he is, in all respects, G.O.D., being part of the Trinity and all…and being omnipotent and omni-everything else, he has unlimited powers. He created the damn universe, something as trivial as hanging on a cross for 3 days would be like crossing the street for most of us.
In my lifetime, I’d definitely put a vote in for this guy. Though some dissident groups claim he’s still alive, he was clearly and unrelentingly putting his life on the line for his cause. But then again so have thousands of others for thousands of causes, but this one happened to be caught on camera.
You can’t measure braveness like you can measure height. There just isn’t a single answer to this question.
Just off the top of my head, here are three very brave people from my lifetime:
The young man who stood in front of the tanks at Tienanmen Square.
King Juan Carlos of Spain, who quietly but stubbornly stayed put during a coup attempt in spite of direct threats on his own life.
The man who jumped into the freezing cold Potomac River in his street clothes when one of the few survivors of a plane was too cold to hold on to the rescue buoy that was being lowered from a helicopter.
Just out of those three, can you pick the “bravest” or the “least brave”? And if it’s a rough job from just three, how could anyone pick the bravest person in all of history?
We cannot tell who is or was the bravest person ever, for two reasons -
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Bravery is not fearlessness. If you have no fear of something, you are not brave about it. Bravery is when you are really frightened and in mental or physical pain, and you are facing overwhelming odds which may mean horrible death or dreadful pain. You find within yourself the moral strength to still do what you must. Bravery is easily confused with fearlessness, because both result in great feats. You cannot tell which is which from outside, as bravery is an inner thing.
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How many people do we remember today? The bravest person ever may have lived 100,000 years ago. Who can tell? It may have been the day little Ug held off the sabre-toothed tiger armed only with his teeth and hands, while the tribe escaped. It did not leave much of Ug, but the tribe ate what was left and honoured his bravery in the eating.
What you really mean is, who was the bravest person we can identify.
Anyway, the bravest man in the world was my dad. He told me so, when i was a kid.
General Questions is for questions with factual answers. IMHO is for opinions and polls.
I’ll move this to IMHO for you.
DrMatrix - General Questions Moderator
Sir Richard Francis Burton, the explorer - not the actor. He went all kinds of places. He even went to Mecca at a time when it was death for Westerners. Of course for that he had to well…be circumsized as an adult without the benefit of anasthetic.
I’m at least as sick of the World Trade Center hoopla as anybody else, but I have to at least nominate Richard Rescorla, the head of security at Morgan Stanley that day. He ignored WTC security who told him to keep his people put and got all but six of Morgan Stanley’s 2,700 people out and was last seen going back up for more. Before this, he was a successful officer in Vietnam, predicted that terrorists would bomb the WTC garage, worked that evacuation and guessed that the next atatck would be by air. I can only wish that my life could be worth as much as his was.
What little I’ve read about Shackleton makes me want to vote for him. Although… he had a lot of integrity and common sense mixed in with the bravery, which probably messes it up a bit.
Amelia Earhart was brave, too, thought probably not bravest ever. The guy who climbed Everest blind has to rank up there.
Check out a list of the Congressional Medal of Honor Awardees, especially those who received the award posthumously.
-me