Zoroaster

Zoroaster was a very important figure for bringing monotheism into this world.

My mother used to grow Zoroasters in her garden. They were planted right beside the Jack-in-the-Pulpits.

My grandfather used to tell me about restoring a 1923 Zoroaster and racing it in rallies through the winding roads and hills of Northern Italy before the war. What I wouldn't give to have driven it just once.

Zoroaster is probably one of the most influential people ever, though there is no written literature from Persia during his time, so we don't know whether his ideas were original. There were countless religions in the ancient world, but most shared certain sensible assumptions about life on Earth – they assumed that life is beneficial to human beings but not designed solely for our benefit, and also that chaos and chance play a role in frustrating our endeavors. Brahmanism, Taoism, Buddhism, Stoicism and other religions elaborated on this belief by defining the role of humanity as living in accordance with nature. Zoroaster disrupted these rational religious ideas by introducing three radical and harmful concepts that have influenced all subsequent beliefs. The first was religious dualism or pessimism – the belief that evil is an active force in the world (as opposed to merely chaos, or human imperfection). This idea is logically tied to the second idea – belief in a "personal" deity... Read more

Probably the most mysterious/ shadowy of the founders of the world's major ancient religions, a dualistic religion with a Manichean view of the universe, indeed that concept influenced later thought immensely. There are still some Zoroastrians today, and it was the faith of a major empire for a long time. I never fail to be amused by people who can't rate someone objectively, who give a figure like this a 1, because it's not their own belief system. That's plain ignorance, and though I suppose a lot of them have never even heard of Zoroaster, I think that a secondary statement by some of those people would be something along the lines of "Ah cain't trust no foreign brown types who have the audacitry to start their names with a Z." It's a list about influence, not personal beliefs.

Zoroastrianism was a forerunner of the three major religions we have today.It was one of the first religious philosophies to be inherently dualistic in it's "Good versus Evil" ideology.For better or worse,these concepts are quite alive and well today.