For the next time you're looking for some way to stir the pot at a boring party. This is from Michael H. Hart's book The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History. No matter what the religion, you can find people the world would have been worse off without. But I didn't know Manicheanism was considered a whole separate religion: seems to me just a quality of most of them. Live and learn. Here's the top twelve:
| Rank | Name | Religious Affiliation | Influence |
| 1 | Muhammad | Islam | Prophet of Islam; conqueror of Arabia; Hart recognized that ranking Muhammad first might be controversial, but felt that, from a secular historian's perspective, this was the correct choice because Muhammad is the only man to have been both a founder of a major world religion and a major military/political leader. More |
| 2 | Isaac Newton | Anglican (rejected Trinitarianism, i.e., Athanasianism; believed in the Arianism of the Primitive Church) | physicist; theory of universal gravitation; laws of motion |
| 3 | Jesus Christ * | Judaism; Christianity | founder of Christianity |
| 4 | Buddha | Hinduism; Buddhism | founder of Buddhism |
| 5 | Confucius | Confucianism | founder of Confucianism |
| 6 | St. Paul | Judaism; Christianity | proselytizer of Christianity |
| 7 | Ts'ai Lun | Chinese traditional religion | inventor of paper |
| 8 | Johann Gutenberg | Catholic | developed movable type; printed Bibles |
| 9 | Christopher Columbus | Catholic | explorer; led Europe to Americas |
| 10 | Albert Einstein | Jewish | physicist; relativity; Einsteinian physics |
| 11 | Louis Pasteur | Catholic | scientist; pasteurization |
| 12 | Galileo Galilei | Catholic | astronomer; accurately described heliocentric solar system |
And an interesting table:
| Religious Affiliation | % in List |
|---|---|
| Catholic | 31% |
| Anglican/Episcopalian | 13% |
| Jewish | 7% |
| Atheist | 6% |
| Greco-Roman paganism | 6% |
| Chinese traditional religion/Confucianism | 5% |
| Lutheran | 5% |
| Russian Orthodox | 4% |
| pre-Nicene Christianity | 3% |
| Platonism | 3% |
| Islam | 2% |
| Hindu | 2% |
| Buddhist | 2% |
| Presbyterian | 2% |
| Zoroastrian | 2% |
| Manicheanism | 2% |
| Quaker | 2% |
| Unitarian/Universalist | 2% |
| Calvinist | 2% |
| Jain | 1% |
| Jansenist | 1% |
| United Brethren | 1% |
| Congregationalist | 1% |
| Dutch Reformed | 1% |
| Egyptian paganism | 1% |
| Mongolian shamanism | 1% |
| Taoism | 1% |
| Baptist | 1% |
| Sandemanian | 1% |
| Protestant (denomination unknown) | 6% |
| unknown | 5% |
raincoaster 
Sandemanian? Mighty obscure…I’ve never heard of that one. (Off I go, to look it up…)
They’re Gaiman fanatics with dyslexia. (talk about inside baseball!)
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Leonardo Da Vinci?…Jesus Christ at 3…..psh
Yep, it doesn’t pay to make the Baby Jesus cry.