Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

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>one should celebrate the birthday of the most influential and awesome man in the history of mankind.

Cool. So why don't you celebrate the birthday of Siddhartha Gautama? Or Confucius? Genghis Khan? Julius Caesar?

Because Jesus was not the most influential man in the history of the world. He was influential, but the world is bigger and history deeper than Christians want to believe.

Hell, the only reason anyone even still cares about Jesus is because the Roman emperor Constantine decided Christians were more valuable to him fighting in his army than being fed to lions. If not for him, Christianity would have just been another weird Levantine cult and would have probably died out. So why not celebrate Constantine's birthday instead?

Or the Apostle Paul's birthday? It was his idea to spread the faith to gentiles after all, and one could argue modern Christianity is more influenced by Paul than Jesus.

This is not an opportunity for you to proselytize me.

> Siddhartha Gautama? Or Confucius? Genghis Khan? Julius Caesar?

Valid question.

Mentioned people are not as nearly influential. Buddha is close though. But there were many enlightened men before and after him. There were many other emperors. But no more figures like jesus, even modern eastern gurus often mention him and reference him as an example.

Paul and others were important for the religion yes, but without jesus and powerful message, influence there would have been nothing to work with. There a tons of examples in history of very popular jesus-like figures with even larger initial traction that nobody even knows today.

So accidentally or not - he is the winner. Why not celebrate that. And i assume that history is bigger than christians want to believe, cant know for sure, im not one.

The comment was not about the religion at all.

jfc

>But no more figures like jesus, even modern eastern gurus often mention him and reference him as an example

Yeah, because they recognise good outside of some strictly foolish religious form because they are not christians.

Dumb comment, not bringing any points to the discussion

You're a programmer, you should be able to extrapolate the point about the statistic I was making.

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