The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived?

in my facebook COEXIST forum, this question was asked and i responded:

i think the guys from Weezer are. after all, they have the song with the title of this thread. however, it's on their red album and it sucked and that discounts that.

I'd go with Jesus.

and what about women? who is the great woman who ever lived? my money is on Catherine of Sienna or Gloria Steinem.

which a response came that:

I hate to vote against Jesus (I do not wish to be insulting to those who hold him in high regard), but as a man I would say he accomplished nothing, and as a god, the term underachiever comes to mind.


Paul was much more influential than Jesus. His writings and those of his followers Mark and Luke comprise a great part, perhaps the majority of the New Testement and transform the biblically recorded works of Jesus from insignificant to not only miraculous but the path to eternal life.

I don't know about the greatest but given Christianity's affects on western civilization, Paul certainly has to be nominated as the most influential person ever.

aside from the fact that this person views Christ as a failure (aren't there scriptures that speak to this? ;-)) there is a good point in the fact that Paul is oft quoted more than Christ in many of our churches. It is my opinion that the more conservative the church, the more you hear Paul. this has been my experience and i could be way off here...

i've been thinking about this question for a while and wonder at the rubric we're using. and since Jason got me reading a certain philosopher again, i had to ask "are we using what Nietzsche called "The master morality" or the "slave morality"?"

Slave morality: the morality created by oppressed people in order to overturn the prevailing values of those in power. Nietzche raises up the example of the early Christians and their new way of thinking that opposed the morality of their Roman masters.

According to Nietzche, morality has never been created through reason, or appeals to civility, or practicality or any other traditional method described by philosophers. instead those in power decide what's good. this is esp. true in the earlies moralities where aristocrats and kings held all the real power in society and dictated what was important in life.

"It was 'the good' themselves, that is to say, the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and est. themselves and their actions as good, that is of the first rank, in contradistinction to all the low, low-minded, common, and plebeian."

Master Morality: include power, beauty, strength, and fame, in other words WORLDLY attributes and partly because the attributes enabled them to stay in power. like Homer's Iliad claims Achilles is the best because he's the most powerful and strongest. In Greek Society, it was the heroes that were the best.

so for me then, the greatest men and women who live are those who resist and follow a slave morality. Gandhi, MLK Jr, Jesus, Paul, St Teresa, Rosa Parks, and many others. those are who we need to hold up as ppl to follow vs. what advertising, government, and yes, even some religious leaders tell us.

to all those in the resistence: inform, infect, do what is unexpected: we are winning: