Most successful religious / secular individual of all time . . .

[AVID]

Mohammad - the author of the Koran, responsible for both the theology of Islam and its main ethical and moral principles.

Impressive!

[DrWeird]

1. I was thinking of The Buddha.

But Mohammed is pretty far up there.

Get ready for outright bigotry in 5, 4, 3...

[AVID]

6. a close second

[bloom]

2. It doesn't seem to me that any one person

is responsible for everything in any religion.

Some are better at seeing what's important, synthesizing and expressing that to others.

[rogerashton]

3. I agree.

Also a very successful diplomat, some (mixed) success as a guerilla leader, effective administrator, successful businessman, and a good and loving husband to his older first wife, Khadija, while she lived -- an unusual virtue in his society.

King David could claim to come close, perhaps up to the same standard in a very different society, on all but the last one. He gets a zero minus on that.

Zoroaster (Zarathustra) could claim the same range relative to religion, and probably Martin Luther, also, but not in the political or business realms.

A very different case might be made for Ben Franklin.

Caesar and Napoleon both went beyond the usual range for military men, but also shared a certain recklessness about making enemies (in Nappy's case, the Russians).

Here are a couple of dark horses: Xenophon and Karol Woytila.

[mirror]

4. in my opinion

it has to be jesus and mohammad.i must also say muslims do hold jesus in high regard whereas christians dont whereas mohammad is concerned.

[rogerashton]

5. The criterion was successful --

religious/secular -- and while I don't want to insult your faith or anything, I thought Jesus was more a paragon of suffering than of success. Especially on the /secular side. But even on the religious side, much of Christianity developed over centuries after what tradition knows as the period of Jesus' lifetime. I know, there are Christians who claim to follow EXACTLY Jesus' moral and theological line -- but there are so many of them, and no more than one can be right, if any is. Careful thought tells us that unlike Islam, there is no sect of Christianity whose ideas can reasonably be thought of as having been uniquely shaped by Jesus of Nazareth.

By the way, it is interesting in just what light Muslims hold Jesus in high regard. He is regarded as a persecuted and, for some time, fugitive rebel against Rome, the Western Enemy of the Muslims. (So in Rumi, anyway.)