Forgetting my Mongol history but didn’t 3 of them die kinda young?
Jesus’ death had an impact on art and literature, but not a major impact on anything else. I’ll admit that the man probably would have preached for peace in most of the instances where there was war, through European history. But I don’t think there’s any particular evidence that his teachings impacted human nature significantly. Intertwined markets and the nuclear bomb are probably the only things that have had any particular dampening effect on human violence, and that is still pretty spotty.
I’ll vote for Mao.
I disagree, but the OP has already said he doesn’t want to discuss religious figures so I’ll just drop it. As for Mao, unless you posit he’d be immortal I don’t see how his death really affected anything. Now, if he’d have died when he was a kid or never been born, that’s something else, but his actual death? Didn’t really change anything. Since religious figures are out, I’ll go with Henrietta Lacks, mentioned above. That’s a death that pretty obviously benefited society in a large way.
Maybe living in a Mongol western Europe wouldn’t be so bad, but the death and suffering and misery and raping/pillaging and stuff they would have done to get to that point would have been a much darker history than what actually happened. And that’s saying something.
I’m not sure which ones you’re referring to, but I do know that Ogedei’s death was the biggest reason why the Mongols put their military conquest of Europe on pause. By the time the political will had returned to continue the invasion, the Europeans were much better able to resist.
Well, YEAH! Cain was, in all the pictures I’ve seen, white and his dad was the richest guy on Earth. For a very limited sample of “guys,” of course.
Didn’t OP ask (very nicely, IMO) that religious figures be excluded from this particular discussion?
Maybe the nice Christians and Non-Christians and Anti-Christians could take their little “was/was not/doesn’t matter” spat to another thread?
I agree. Mao was pretty much a spent force by 1976. He was still revered as an icon in China but he was no longer actually running things.
Here’s a suggestion: Walther Wever. He was the Luftwaffe Chief of Staff in the early Nazi era. Wever was a big proponent of strategic bombing and pushed for Germany to develop long-range heavy bombers. But then he died in 1936 (ironically in a plane crash). The push for strategic bombers died with him.
As a result, the Battle of Britain was fought with medium and light bombers. There were no German equivalents to the Halifax or Lancaster. If Wever had lived and succeeded in getting the Luftwaffe to build a real bomber fleet, Britain might have sought a peace settlement. And those same bombers would have been useful attacking the Soviet industrial base. Germany could have won the war.
Not from what I know of that period in European history.
And anyway, that only happens if you, you know, resisted.
[del]Wrong.
OK, number one: You don’t have a body. That means that there is less evidence for Jesus’s life than for huge chunks of the Egyptian ruling class far earlier than him.
Two: The explosion of Christianity may not have anything much at all to do with Jesus’s death. Probably not his in particular. Certainly other would-be Messiahs had been executed by Rome. But maybe this particular one dying quite so young after preaching such a strong socialist/mystical message made it stick out.
Three: The explosion of Christianity, if one is a Christian, can be credited to the Holy Spirit, perhaps (although I doubt she exists, considering her abject failure to stop Xtianity from splitting into heresies intent on killing each other).
But nonbelievers have a stickier question: Why this weird monotheist/mystic/social-uplift/just-plain-weird mashup? Was it Paul? Was it the attraction of Semitic monotheism stripped of circumcision? Was it the desire for a sort of anti-Caesar? Was it plain dumb luck?
Anyway, I think you have a weak case.[/del]
Cite?
I can go with that.
Yeah, that might have been…not so bad as all that. Certainly it would have been different. Would there have been Christianized Mongol Khans in later eras fighting Turkicized Mongol cousins?
Wow. Was that the New York Times or the Weekly World News?
Lots of unfounded speculation, in a small article in English, where it may not even be noticed by Russian historians.
I don’t believe it.
An obscure man from a lower middle class family who grew up 2000 years ago in a small middle eastern village in a conquered nation, making himself known over a three year period in a limited geography by foot transportation… yep it’s amazing there is any record of him at all.
People said they saw, heard and talked to him then wrote about him and traveled the known world to spread his message; I truly don’t think they got together one day and said “Hey, let’s make up a fictional character, quit our jobs and go around acting like he really existed.”
The strike through is a nice touch. Feel free to start a debate on this if you wish to discuss it further. Personally and as an atheist/agnostic I’d say that trying to point to a few royal mummies in a state that obsessed on preserving the dead as an indication of why we should have a body for Jesus if he was real is either disingenuous or shows a rather profound lack of understanding the larger context and sets an unreasonably high bar, but I guess that’s for another discussion. Should I strike through all of this as if I didn’t say it, now?
The distinction of Henrietta Lacks and Stalin/Mao et al. shows a distinction between the two interpretations of the question. Whose death by itself has produced a benefit for society (HeLa, Jesus, MLK’s martyrdom, etc.) and whose death prevented the most atrocities (Stalin, Mao, Hitler, etc.)
Good points, but no real debate has broken out.
Off to IMHO.
Our top story tonight: Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, is still dead… 
Reminds me of this xkcd.