Query: Whom do you think are probably the prize half-dozen SOBs throughout human history?

I'll start with my six candidates:

Brhaspati, the ancient founder of Lokayata philosophy in ancient India who disapproved of feeding the indigent or sheltering the traveler.

Critias, the ancient Greek dictator, head of the Thirty Tyrants, who is the earliest (known, extant) head of state to have carried out a cold-blooded extermination policy in peace time.

Pope Gregory IX, who initiated the Inquisition, changed what had been free-lance persecution of Jews into official Church policy, and gave official Church sanction to the institution of slavery in an official encyclical.

Jean Meslier, the first one in post-Renaissance times to explicitly argue for a variation of class/group genocide.

Joseph Stalin, responsible for the establishment of the Soviet gulags and responsible for at least 15 million deaths.

Adolf Hitler, responsible for the Holocaust, which killed millions, including six million Jews, and responsible for the start of World War II.

Thoughts?

Stein

Varangian wrote:Pope Urban II, for initiating the crusades. Over 900 years later, his action has repercussions.

Mohammed, for inventing Islam.

You know, I actually went back and forth between Urban II and Gregory IX as the worst pope most directly responsible for putting the stamp of the jackboot on Roman Catholicism and making Western Christianity decisively lose its way. I'm still going back and forth on that. On the one hand, Urban II is earlier and that certainly gives him a certain priority. On the other, the first crusade -- unlike practically all the later ones -- could possibly be construed as a partly defensive operation, with al-Hakim bi-Amr being the chief culprit, and one who was also responsible for Islam's losing its way in the bargain. There is nothing ameliorating about Gregory IX's abuses, though, even though he was later.

So it's maybe a wash. I can imagine myself changing my mind on that yet again. After all, under Urban II, the Rhineland Massacres alone pro-actively set a pattern, no question. Hey, I've gone back and forth on these two popes so often and I assume that I'll continue to.

There are far worse culprits than Mohammed. Mohammed's is a checkered career, of course, with lots of bloodshed and lots of generosity side by side. The history of Islam parallels that. As I wrote in another thread, Mohammed begins "in periodic raids and military clashes with various tribes, in which even helpless prisoners are put to death by the hundreds". It "culminates in a renunciation of all further violence, with Mohammed abruptly traveling through the whole dangerous region with no weapons at all in a dedicated attempt to establish peace among the tribes, in a manner strongly reminiscent of Mesalim and Confucius." I elaborate further on that in an amplifying post here --

http://www.rationalskepticism.org/histo ... l#p1017943

In essence, he ended up as a peacemaker with those very parties who had initiated hostilities with him in the first place. It would have been great if he had applied that courage and generosity at the outset. He didn't, which is what makes him very ordinary. But he isn't a paragon and he isn't a sociopath <shrug>.

Islam parallels this. There is both a remarkably generous and a remarkably bloody strain that runs side by side throughout its history. The height of culture and the height of barbarity are at constant odds all the time. We have one of the greatest cultures of all time in Andalusian Spain, but we also have a psychopathic madman like al-Hakim bi-Amr, whose insane thirst for conquest was arguably the catalyst for the horrors of our equally inexcusable Crusades. Hey, if you want to submit al-Hakim bi-Amr as a strong candidate instead of Mohammed, you'd get little argument from me.

Cheers,

Stein

Animavore wrote:Saul of Taursus.

You know there is actually a strain of devout Jesus believers whom I've personally encountered who are as devout as any Christians when it comes to Jesus, but who have actually torn out the Paul pages from their Bibles! They view Paul as being a pernicious perverter of the Jesus message. So it's interesting that you should single him out here.

Cheers,

Stein

rEvolutionist wrote:George W Bush.

Too soon?

He did betray a sacred trust: a Constitutional Republic based on the rule of law was entrusted to him. That was desecrated by him through an aggressive war of choice based on lies, through violations of the Geneva Conventions which had the force of law in this country, through warrantless wiretaps, and so on. He did not designedly slaughter as many civilians as a Hitler or a Stalin, though, which makes him relatively small-scale in a list like this, even though he was clearly a thorough outlaw and a scumbag. Actually, when it comes to Presidents of the United States, I think one might make a better argument for either Truman, whose dropping of the second atom bomb on Nagasaki seems purely gratuitous to me, or Jackson, whose flouting of a Supreme Court verdict mandating protection for an Indian tribe in Georgia was totally, shamelessly illegal.

Cheers,

Stein

Varangian wrote:Well, for more modern bad guys, enter Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. Hitler would've been just another tinpot dictator if it hadn't been for the henchmen who put his ideas into a working plan.

Oh, they're both bad, very bad. Very true. I guess I still get back to my notion of the "originator": Without Hitler, what would Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich have been? Undertakers? Seriously, I guess they might have perpetrated a few horrors of their own, but my guess is that Hitler was an essential enabler to their becoming ........ who they were.

Cheers,

Stein

james1v wrote:Pol-Pot. Thoroughly nasty.

Closely followed by Jebus (If he existed!) He gave so many, false hope. the crusades, witch hunts, heretic hunts etc would never have been so thorough, and long lasting, if he hadn't been invented/existed.

I disagree. I think Theodosius I is responsible for stuff like that. In fact, I was seriously thinking of including him instead of Gregory IX or Urban II. The latter two are certainly more deadly in the way that they place cruelty as an intrinsic ingredient in a Christian institution. But Theodosius I is the first to diametrically set himself against "Love your enemies". He is the polar opposite of Jesus, which is why it's silly to blame Jesus for "the crusades, witch hunts, heretic hunts etc." That's like blaming the emancipation of the slaves for the Jim Crowe laws.

Sincerely,

Stein

cavarka9 wrote:vasco da gama, disgusting character, brutal and ruthless, but strangely, a person who died as a hero. Ant there is the irony called life.

Again, popes like Urban II and Gregory IX bear ultimate responsibility for characters like that, I guess. But maybe I'm getting too hung up on where sick ideas first start <shrug>.

Cheers,

Stein