Who is your hero? (PPR Version)

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1. Who is your secular hero?

2. Who is your religious hero?

3. Who is your literary hero?

4. Anyone else for special mention?

For me.

1. Winston Churchill. He knew what it was to have issues and still keep going no matter what.

2. St. Thomas More. For being able to say truth to power.

3. Dostoyevsky. Crime and Punishment rocks

4. Patton. very interesting man

Cool idea for a thread;

1, It's hard to pick one, but Sal Khan is one of my favourites. Anyone who has a part in the fantastic "Free Information" movement is my hero; Patrick of Patrick JMT, Jimmy Wales, Julian Assange...

2, Descartes would be my religious hero; that guy was one of my favourite philosophers, and I use the fruits of his mathematical ideas every day in college. I don't know how devotedly religious he is, although I imagine from his world view he was a deist.

3, Dawkin's wrote some pretty fantastic books on Evolution, but I'll have to go with either Wolfgang van Goethe or Dante. They wrote some of my favourite stuff.

4, Dr. Gerald Cizadlo's online lectures allowed me to learn Physiology to a pretty decent degree two years before I went to college. Technically he would fit under 1, but he deserves a special mention because his lectures managed to get me through my Leaving Cert year without offing myself.

I am against the Idea of heros especially the everyday kind.
but as a human I am prone to Hypocrisy
so here it goes

1. Who is your secular hero?
Eugene Debs

1. Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
2. Jesus. Fighting religious and economic establishment to the point of getting killed is good stuff, makes him the only cool religious person.
3. Jules Verne
4. Me. I am basically made of awesome. I could defeat a chess master and a box champion in box and chess, respectively.

I can only think of one historical figure that I might say I admire. That would be john brown. The rest(that is historical figures that I have taken some amount of interest in) although some might impress me all come about as rather bland.

1. George Carlin. He had a knack for laying out the ugly truth and making you laugh in the process.

2. Jack Parsons. Rocket scientist, occultist, and libertarian activist. Pioneered the solid-fuel rocket, performed black magick with L. Ron Hubbard, made a hot actress his "Scarlet Woman", and blew himself up making rocket fuel. What a life!

3. H.P. Lovecraft. The depths of his imagination knew no bounds, nor did his vocabulary.

4. Trey Azagtoth. lava-generating guitarist for Morbid Angel. Possibly on the spectrum.

1. Henry Rearden
2. Don't have any
3. Ayn Rand, Edward Cline, Victor Hugo
4. Leonard Peikoff,

Being that his field of study is philosophy, not mathematics; I fail to see the relevance of your childish attempt at an insult.

Got anything positive to say?

Secular hero - Arminius, the Romanized Germanic chief who set aside his Roman education and upbringing to lead a successful uprising against the Romans, freeing Germania, and resetting the course of history.

Religious hero - Martin Luther, which probably isn't a surprise to WP members who know I'm a Lutheran. Sure, Luther was often possessed by his rage, rather than being in possession of it. And true, he spent his final years crazy, and an embittered Antisemite. But he had balls of steel for standing up for his convictions, had a grasp on God's grace that few others have understood.
And the most flawed of us, like Luther, needs said grace the most.

Literary hero - Robert E. Howard, who gave us an American alternative to Tolkien; in particular, Conan the barbarian. Though underrated as a great author, few other writers have the power of description that Howard had, not to mention the headlong fervor so common in his fiction. He was also very probably an fellow Aspie and over all troubled man who in the end took his own life, depriving the world of the countless other literary yarns he might have spun for us.

Special mention - My father, William D. Link Sr. (1921 - 1986)
He inspired me to become the man I am today, for better or worse, more than I can completely appreciate. He never understood why he could never quite fit in as one of the gang, or why others weren't always interested in his long diatribes. And he never grasped why he had bouts of anger, despair, and paranoia. But he also was a storehouse of knowledge, which he could speak on eloquently. And he was a loyal father and friend. I only wish he could have lived long enough for a diagnosis for what I was certain had been Asperger's. Maybe then, he could have had some peace and self-understanding in his remaining years.
It's no surprise why I have so many flawed heroes.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

@ruveyn:

Given your penchant for childish emotionalism, you and Hume make good partners.