I just ran across a very interesting website by Clifford Pickover which purports to rank the best and worst people in all of history.
Here are his picks:
Evil People
1. Tomas de Torquemada
2. Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler)
3. Adolph Hitler
4. Ivan the Terrible
5. Adolph Eichmann
6. Pol Pot
7. Mao Tse-tung
8. Idi Amin
9. Joseph Stalin
10. Genghis Khan
11. H. H. Holmes
12. Gilles de Rais
Good People
1. Buddha
2. Baha’u’llah
3. Dalai Lama
4. Jesus Christ
5. Moses
6. Mother Theresa
7. Abraham Lincoln
8. Martin Luther King
9. Mohandas Gandhi
Obviously, we as Christians would radically differ in his assessment of Jesus, and I personally have questions about the relative ranking of many individuals on his list. Still, the exercise is an intriguing one: who would you rank as the most righteous and most vile people of all time?
Tom paine????