Yoooo Sicarius, I'm down for a game. Make it PPSC, no more than 50 pts, 24 hour phase.

Word!

Lol I'm in sure.

Wot-woo! This would be great.

Rasputin
Mark Wahlberg
Ron Paul
Someone said Shackleton, good choice I agree
Ludacris
Jennifer Garner

Actually scratch Wahlberg, he would hog Jennifer Garner.

I'll replace him with Robert Seagull from NPR.

trim101, Sicarius, you don't have to believe in the Bible to believe that there was a Jewish man named Jesus who lived at about the same time as the Jesus of the Bible, and who was crucified by the Romans. Many modern scholars agree, as Sicarius points out, that potential inaccuracies in the Bible arising from repeated translations, etc. (In fact, even English has changed enough since 1611 when the Authorized/King James version was first published that contemporary readers commonly misunderstand parts of it. So "errors" creep in even without translation.) But there are plenty of extra-Biblical sources about Jesus, Paul of Tarsus (St. Paul of the Bible), and others. The Wikipedia article on Jesus has a good collection of references and notes, if you're interested. (Not that one should believe everything one reads on Wikipedia, but it's a starting point, after which one can look up primary sources.)
There's a lot of disagreement about many other facts in the gospel, and of course even more about the divinity of Jesus, but to say that Jesus is a fantasy character like Gandalf or Jessica Rabbit is somewhat risible. (Sicarius, I know you didn't say that, so that's not directed to you.)


On the subject of catching flies with honey, I also used to think it was a stupid saying. A friend recently told me that I was thinking about it wrong: It's not that you want to welcome flies by giving them honey. You want to kill them so they're not buzzing around and infecting everything, but you need to catch them first, so you use the honey as a trap. She claims that the saying means that even when you want to destroy something, you can be more effective by giving it what it wants than letting your hate for it make you give it something obviously undesirable. I have absolutely no idea how plausible this interpretation is, but I'm choosing not to find out, because at least now the saying doesn't annoy me every time I hear it.

Gaius Octavius Thurinis (AKA Augusts Caesar - the kid who out-politicked Cicero and out-generaled Marcus Antonius while still in diapers. I'm shocked no one else has put him on their lists)
Henry II of England (the Peter O'toole Lion in Winter version)
Louis XI of France (the Spider King - asserted the supremacy of the French King over the nobility)
Charles II of Navarre (Claimant to the French throne during the Hundred Years' War and a major pain in the rear end to his cousin, Charles V, a second-string pick)
Pope Innocent III (Far and away the greatest political pope ever)
Salah ud-Din (Saladin)

The advent of the modern nation-state and the division of diplomacy and military leadership makes it impossible to see who is good at both, I think, hence the exclusively pre-modern picks.

Julius Caeser
Charlemagne
Alfred the Great
Duke of Wellington
Garibaldi
JFK

George W Bush as Austria... You always need one simple minded idiot to take an early exit after all :)

Oscar Wilde
George Benard Shaw
Woody Allen
Bill Hicks
Jerry Seinfeld
Peter Cook
John Cleese

Hitler - Germany
Talleyrand (everybody already mentioned Napoleon) - France
Julius Caesar - Italy
Alexander - Greek/Turk
Ivan the terrible - Russia
Elizabeth I - England

i'd like to play with kissinger, that would be cool since he's still alive.

@spyman i think that list pretty much trumps everyone else, except i would swap jerry seinfield for richard prior and george benard shaw for stephen fry

Khalid ibn al-Walid (The Sword of God, 100+ battles undefeated)
Chester William Nimitz
Subutai (Khan's general strategist)
Scipio Africanus (Defeated Hannibal)
Erwin Rommel
Robert the Bruce, or maybe his nemesis Edward Longshanks but I'll go with Robbie because he won. Oh and he was also responsible for the Declaration of Arbroath, the first ever "Declaration of Independence".
These Romans Emperors: Octavian (Augustus), Vespasian, Diocletian or Justinian (east roman) can be one hand as replacements.

regarding Jesus: A group of theologians (these are people who really believe in god) got together and formed the Jesus Seminar to "decide" which stories of Jesus were historically real and which weren't. They pretty much voted on every line of the bible that was connected to Jesus and if more than half thought it was real they said, OK it's real.
The result:
15% of the Jesus story was classified as historical
0% was unanimously classified as historical
please note again that this is from theologians who if anything are biased in favor of the Jesus myths being true.

It's quite possible that there was a real person called Jesus but due to the huge amount of myth and legend that has strung up around him I doubt we'll ever know for sure. Dito regarding Pythagoras.

Well damnit! I had a whole long post and list, and it just up and disapeared... Let's try again (hopefully I can remember all of them...)

Erwin Rommel
Metternich
Bismark
Sun Tzu
Machiavelli
Kissinger

I also have a bunch of others I'd love to play with, that could easily sub in for any of the above (really there were just the first list of six I came up with that I liked a lot). I'd also love to play with/see these people play: Elizabeth I, Edward I (Longshanks), Robert The Bruce, Tito (he must have been good, he managed to hold the Balkans together for like 50 years, and to keep Yugoslavia around without the support of either the Soviets or the US), Indira Ghandi, Augustus Caesar, Wellington, Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, General Zhukov, Churchill, Miyamoto Musashi (author of the Five Rings), Saladin, Ghengis Khan, Alexander The Great, William The Conquerer, Henry V, Shogun Tokugawa, Che Guevera, Eisenhower, Fidel Castro... I could go on and on (and probably will in a follow up post).

@Skeptic_ka you beat me to several, especially Edward I and Robert The Bruce!

oops! I meant sceptic_ka

Me.
Shepard Book
Malcom Reynolds
River Tam
Zoey
Nishka
Inara

would be great...

Otto von Bismarck
Mikhail Gorbachev
Niccolo Machiavelli
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

not sure about the rest... I think i would like to play a game with John Edwards and Richard Sharp, but...

Actually I would play with all math-types.

Archimedes
Pythagoras
Descartes
Einstein
Newton
Hippocrates

That would be fun.

I want to get this game started, but we need more people...

sceptic_ka, I don't think that all of the scholars in the Jesus seminar are Christian, or even all religious, though they are all probably experts in the relevant academic fields. (Which is merely to address the charge of bias.) You're right that the group concludes that parts of the Bible may not be based in history. However, note that my post (like Invictus' post) was explicitly *not* claiming Biblical infallibility; I said that there were plenty of extra-Biblical sources leading us to conclude that there was a person called Jesus who lived at the proper time, etc. The Jesus seminar does in fact believe in the historicity of Jesus, who was crucified, etc. They believe that he was not the Son of God, was not raised from the dead, and that much of what is attributed to him did not occur, but that's not what was in dispute in this thread. Invictus said "You don't have to believe that Jesus was the Son of God, but there was a Jewish guy named Jesus...". The preponderance of evidence does seem to indicate that a person called Jesus existed.

As for the existence of Pythagoras, I've never studied the matter, but to the best of my knowledge, there doesn't seem to be much dispute over his existence. People claim that some of "his" theorems/results were actually due to his followers, but I've never heard anyone argue that he didn't exist. I'd be happy to be corrected about this, though.

I'm really an incarnation of Pythagoras and I exist so therefore Pythagoras must have existed. Here's a video I made to prove it...
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=bP3i5dpezuk

am I the only one who would include Edi Birsan in my game?

"The preponderance of evidence does seem to indicate that a person called Jesus existed."
Given the fact that Jesus was a very common name back then I don't doubt that. The question is can we tie a particular Jesus to any of the NT claim about the Jesus? I think the Jesus seminar cast doubts on that.

Since we're on the topic of fictional characters here are mine:
Bean from the Ender series
Honor Harrington
Yoda
Jean Luc Picard
Mat from the wheel of time series
Tywin Lannister from the ice and fire series
the Christan god (if he agrees to not read my mind ^_^)

PS: "Don't you have any sense on decency and respect for people's beliefs?"
I respect people and respect achievements but I do not respect beliefs. You are free to believe whatever you want to and I'll defend your right to believe it but if you believe something silly like "Jesus came back from the dead" expect it to be mocked.

@sceptic_ka - You say: "The question is can we tie a particular Jesus to any of the NT claim about the Jesus?" Actually it has been reiterated several times that that is explicitly NOT the question being asked. The question being asked (though I'm not sure why) is whether there was a historical figure who was the basis for the Jesus in the New Testament? Most scholars would argue that yes this historical figure existed. Whether you literally believe any of the words in the New Testament, is more or less immaterial.

There is a fair amount of evidence, from contemporary (to Jesus) scholars who mention a movement that was led by someone called Jesus of Nazareth. There's very little doubt among scholars that a specific person named Jesus did exist, and did lead a sect within the Jewish faith of the time, that this sect was the group that eventually became Christians, and that this person who led this sect is the historical base for the person worshiped by Christians.

That's the only information relevant to the discussion going on here at the moment, and there is very little doubt that that is all true.

Whether you believe he performed any of the miracles mentioned in the New Testament, or whether you believe he was divine are questions for another discussion. Though, it's not a very interesting discussion.

Thank you, DrOct; that's an admirable summary of the discussion. As you point out, it's somewhat tangential to the original purpose of this thread, so perhaps we should all just drop it.

I would invite a bunch of N00bs, because I love winning.

TheCheeseStandsAlone: yes. you stand alone.

@nitish, agreed, we should drop that discussion. Unfortunatly as long as trim keeps baiting Invictus, and Invictus keeps taking the bait, I fear the nearly every thread here is going to devolve into pointless discussions about religion.

that's not to say that all discussions of religion are pointless or boring, but so far this one has been, and I imagine most started by someone baiting someone else will be too.