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The days are growing long, the weather is getting warm – it puts one into a whimsical mood.
So, what if you could spend a day with 12 people – famous people living or not.
As for ‘famous’ – it could be anyone you can name or describe (example: the first person to invent the wheel) them.
Send your top 12 in in the comments and in a few days, I’ll make a post of the lists.
June 6, 2013 at 01:03
Jim Morrison would be first choice. Followed by Friedrich Nietzsche.
Actually, that’s about it really.
June 6, 2013 at 05:18
Xanthippa:
Okay, here’s my list:
Alexander the Great
Genghis Khan
Julius Ceasar
Jesus Christ
Imhotep
The architect of Göbekli Tepe
Thomas Jefferson
Mayer Amschel Rothschild
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Carl Friedrich Gauss
Albert Einstein
Paul Dirac
This was a difficult list to compile! I had to whittle it down from about fifty names that absolutely had to be included in the top dozen. And I can’t rid myself of this nagging feeling that there are at least fifty more, whom I have forgotten…
June 6, 2013 at 14:19
very good list code slinger.
i would certainly like to meet jesus.
you know, to see who he REALLY was.
Xanthippa says: I’m with you on the Jesus thing – though, I can tell you who he is most likely to have been, if we rely on the Biblical accoung: a Jewish terrorist.
I madw my list, but did not post it yet because I did not want to interfere with others’ processing of the question.
And, I have to say, several people on CodeSlinger’s list made it on my ‘early’ list and only got cut in the final round…
June 6, 2013 at 15:04
i suspect jesus was a cult leader, in the same sense that the Davidians or Jim Jones was.
Xanthippa says:
No, I don’t think he was – those people drank their own kool-aid, so-to-speak.
I don’t think Jesus ever really bought into religion as anything other than a political tool. He was a Jewish nationalist who wanted to rid Judea of Romans. He was very intelligent and educated – and particularly studied the Jewish religious prophecies. In order to gain political control, he needed the masses – and so he crassly went about staging the prophecies, so the regular Jews would ‘recognize’ him as the Messiah and sweep him to power. We get glimpses of this in the Bible, like with the donkey story (so he could arrive in Jerusalem astride a donkey).
Once he had the rabble behind him, he started to commit acts of terrorism in order to destabilize the established government, force a war and, with the numbers behind him, sieze control.
I’d say Jesus saw himself similarly to how Osama bin Laden saw himself, but was more ambitious, more crafty and more intelligent.
June 7, 2013 at 03:49
Juggernaut:
Yeah, Jim Morrison occurred to me, too. Along with Frank Zappa, John Lennon, Timothy Leary, and Vito Paulekas. But in the end, none of these guys made the list.
Jesus Christ came from a sub-list including Abraham, Muhammad, Zarathustra, Sidhartha Gautama, Confucius, and Lao Tse. Picking only one from that list was a tough call!
I realized that what I really wanted was to have one day for the dozen greatest religious thinkers, one for the greatest natural philosophers, one for the greatest rulers, one for the richest men, one for the greatest warriors, and so on. But then some of the truly great men of history would belong in more than one group…
Xanthippa has set us an excellent puzzle: deceptively simple to state, but open-ended in its ramifications.
Xantippa says:
Jim Morrison was also on my first list, but did not make the first cut…
CodeSlinger – in an interesting twist, your list has a significant overlap with my husband’s list.
I’m waiting for a few more lists to come in via email, then I’ll publish them. I think we’ll have fun reading them!
June 7, 2013 at 03:58
Xanthippa:
None of these guys made it onto your list? Interesting. Now I’m really curious to see your list!
Anyway, you and I have a remarkably similar view of biblical prophecy, though I don’t think it was Christ who formulated the plan. I think that was the handiwork of a cabal of talmudic scholars (pun intended).
I would even go so far as to say that I don’t see prophecy in, for example, Revelations. I see a plan. Hidden in plain sight for all to read, but only for “him who has eyes” to see. Just ask yourself, exactly who are the Elders refering to when the speak of “angels of the Lord”?
Hint: as S. L. MacGregor Mathers writes in The Kabbalah Revealed, “the task of the initiate is to understand that Jehova is Elohim.”
And no, this is not inconsistent with my posts extolling the benefits of religion as one of the structural members of a stable culture and society. On the subject of religion (as I keep pointing out), I’m with Seneca the Younger:
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”
Xanthippa says:
I’m with you on Seneca the Younger.
And, I also see a plan, rather than a prophecy.
Just think ‘Dune’…
June 7, 2013 at 18:09
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