Who's your historical hero?

Exactly, for his time Thomas Jefferson was so liberal he'd basically be near a Trotskyist in today's time.

 

Winston Churchill.

 

Considering Trotsky's handling of the Kronstadt rebellion (1921), that's not much of a compliment. Trotsky was also Commander of the Red Army during the Russian civil war, so he had a lot of blood on his hands.

As for Jefferson and his contemporaries, would he have made friends with a black plantation owner having white slaves?

Here are some more excerpts from the Wikipedia entry for Jefferson:

Jefferson's win over the Federalist John Adams in the general election was derided in its time for how the electoral college was set up under the three-fifths compromise at the Constitutional convention. Jefferson owed part of his election to the South's inflated number of Electors due to slave-holdings, which meant that twelve of Jefferson's electoral votes—his margin of victory—were derived from citizenry who were denied the vote...

While President, Jefferson wrote that "The appointment of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I."

Jefferson's first promotions of Indian Removal were between 1776 and 1779, when he recommended forcing the Cherokee and Shawnee tribes to be driven out of their ancestral homelands to lands west of the Mississippi River. His first such act as president, was to make a deal with the state of Georgia that if Georgia were to release its legal claims to discovery in lands to the west, then the U.S. military would help forcefully expel the Cherokee people from Georgia. At the time, the Cherokee had a treaty with the United States government which guaranteed them the right to their lands, which was violated in Jefferson's deal with Georgia.

"If we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down until that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi."


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We can't hold people from 250 years ago to our same morals, it's asinine and not productive to viewing history. It basically leaves every single person alive in 1780 as a complete and total asshole.

 

I really dig Hannibal. Hannibal had real guts. He rode elephants into Cartilage. --Mike Tyson

 

Cartilage -- yeah, this sounds like the kind of thing Iron Mike would come up with. Of course Cartilage (or was it Carthage) was Hannibal's home base, not the object of his attack.

 

lmao

 

Jesus. lol, I'm not christian but the dude was all about the right things.

Cept I would have been a rider. Maybe some Jesus plus a dash of 'by any means necessary' Malcom X

 

I too, and a great admirer of Jesus, the man.

When I read the New Testament myself, I get the picture of a devout Jew, living in a country oppressed by the Romans, and knowing that he was a direct descendant of King David.

It's funny to say, but I think Jesus had the first "Messiah Complex." I think he intended to start a political revolt on Passover, and to establish a very ethical kingdom, the "Kingdom of God." When the revolt fizzled, and he was executed for treason against Rome, I think his cry of "My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?" is one of the saddest and most heart-felt questions in history. I think he died believing that his God had forsaken him.

I don't find all of the "magic tricks" and extraordinary events in the Bible to be necessarily credible. I think either the original authors, including Matthew and John, got a little carried away trying to make their point, or else things were added before the surviving manuscripts were written. I'm not saying that all of the "miracles" didn't happen; I'm just saying that there is not sufficient proof for me to believe that they did happen.

The funny thing is, I seem to do a better job of following Jesus' ethical and moral teachings when I relate to him as a wise-but-normal human being, instead of being infallible and the Son of God.

 

hmmm... i like neal cassady, orwell, lao tzu, jefferson, kerouac... lots of folks

 

Leonardo Da Vinci, Sappho, Salvador Dali, Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFmxxpHMee8&feature=fvw"]YouTube- Kblaze - Bill Walton

 

Samuel Langhorne Clemens pen name Mark Twain

 

What we've got here (and I'm no Biblical scholar) is an oral tradition. Let's say Jesus attends a wedding where they can't afford wine, so he blesses the water consumed as though it were wine. The story gets told and retold around the campfires for a couple of generations, and one night Uncle Ezekial or someone after a few drinks swears that Jesus really changed the water to wine, then blessed it. Now Uncle Ezekial is an elder of stature in the community, and no one really wants to challenge him, so from then on the oral tradition contains that little error. Besides which, people want and need miracles, they get old or sick, they fear death, they need the mystical power of these legends. Why ruin a good story by letting the truth get in the way?

 

I'm taking psychology and Erik Erikson was pretty revolutionary in how we understand life. You never stop growing, never stop learning.
Also, I've always liked Richard Dawkins, Einstein, and Steven Hawkins.

 

Robbert Oppenheimer was pretty cool. The two main creators of the original bomb and the fusion bomb, Oppenheimer and Teller. Teller basically wanted to blow up the world I think or at least set policies that took us dangerously close. Oppenheimer understood the magnitude of what they had created:

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

 

I've been reading about Rene Descartes... man, he was pretty cool.

 

everyone, great and small, who has ever had to choose between allowing themselves to be killed, or lie to themselves, and choose allowing themselves to be killed.

 

there are so many awesome humans in the past.. idk.

Jesus if he existed
Gandhi was cool
HST
Tim Leary

 

Queen Elizabeth Tudor I.

Tudor history is absolutely fascinating and of course no one is more fascinating then the Virgin Queen (except her father...but for different reasons) in my personal opinion.