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% |
Curiouser and curiouser: how strange can this Squid get? They think maybe it just gnawed things with the teeth and then sort of slid around until the actual intake met up with the mangled prey and hoovered it up. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. How many years of nursery school do you need to become a paleontologist?
If you google "sexually deprived bitter women" my blog comes up fifth, not that I fucking goddam resent that. I'll be number one some day.
