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scottie on 11 April 2013
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Strawman much.

Who is the most influential person in the world: Oprah, or me? Everyone is going to pick Oprah.

But up some decent alternatives for most influential person and you'll get a real choice.

Obama - too recent to even see if he has a lasting influence, he is disqualified.

Greg Johnson, Elvis, shakespeare, gibson? - That's hilarious that you're even naming musicians/writers of 'for the masses' entertainment. No, entertainers are not influential.

I'm not even convinced that Franklin was America's most influential political figure, but I do not believe that at any point, the timeline of America would have been significantly altered by the removal of any one man. [Edit: Clarification, by man I meant American political figure]

Oh, and I hope you are not confusing the Muslim God (Allah) with the Muslim human prophet, Mohammad? Regardless, I think that considering all the recent superpowers have been Christian of some description (Spain, France, England, USA, Russia), we can assume Jesus is more influential


Marx? Now here's finally someone that a) has had influence on the world, and b) we can observe it. We can attribute to him the rise of soviet Russia, which of course caused the success of the allies in WW2, and then the development of the cold war afterwards. Obviously, that influence we have attributed to him is much more significant than Europe being Christian instead of Jewish or Muslim, which they would have been otherwise - if it weren't for Christianity, people would simply have latched onto whatever other story helped assuage their fear of death). So yes, assuming you believe that the Russian revolution would not have occurred, or would have occurred in a very different direction, your one decent candidate takes the gold.

So now that I've knocked down pretty much all your candidates (and seriously, it is a very annoying debating technique to strawman someone, please don't do it in the future.), who else do I think was more influential than Jesus?

Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Isaas Newton, Alan Turing all have a much more significant impact on our lives today than Jesus ever did. Arguably the same could be said for Maxwell, Planck, Faraday and some astronomers

Political figures? Hitler, Stalin, Napoleon for starters, the rise/fall of Rome was due to too many people to put someone down for that, same with Britain and the USA. Arguably Khrushchev too.

The thing is, if Jesus didn't exist, we would be sitting at our computers, discussing a thread about how "Mohammad is the most influential person ever". If many of the people I mentioned above didn't exist, we would have computers by which to have this discussion, for a few of those people (Stalin, Turing, Marx), I wouldn't be part of this discussion because I would have been executed as a homosexual, nor would there be any Jews, Black people or any other of Hitler's 'undesireables'.