"I'm what the world considers to be a phenomenally successful man. And I've failed much more than I've succeeded. And each time I fail, I get my people together, and I say, "Where are we going?" And it starts to get better." - Calvin Trager
Monday, April 12, 2004 Who is the most popular person of all time?
An interesting question ... and what better way to answer it than to google a whole bunch of names and see how many sites come up.
The first name I Googled was Jesus Christ (you couldn't just put "Jesus" in there because like saying "Bob", you get a whole bunch of sites about Jesus Martinez and the like - I also ran into this problem on a much bigger scale with Madonna and was unable to resolve it).
Our Lord and Savior racked up 5,310,000 sites on Google.
That seemed pretty good ... and it seemed even better when I started putting in some other names and seeing how J.C. stacked up:
Buddha - 3,270,000
Mohammed - 2,000,000
Krishna - 1,480,000
Allah - 3,360,000
Dalai Lama - 569,000
John Paul II - 1,070,000
Desmond Tutu - 142,000
Rowan Williams - 43,100
So Jesus seems to be in pretty good shape in the realm of religious figures. But can he hack it in the secular world? Well, first results are encouraging:
Michael Jordan -- 1,410,000
Barry Bonds - 687,000
Jessica Simpson - 957,000
Nick Lachey - 63,600 (Ouch ... not the good end of that power couple)
Janet Jackson - 2,140,000
Michael Jackson - 2,400,000
George W. Bush - 4,290,000 (getting DANGEROUSLY close)
John Kerry - 2,210,000 (those numbers gotta go up)
Ralph Nader - 544,000
Howard Dean - 1,260,000 (Hey ... he's more popular than Jessica Simpson)
Christina Aguilera - 2,330,000
Demi Moore - 599,000
Harrison Ford - 1,180,000
Steven Spielberg - 633,000
Tom Hanks - 566,000
Ronald Reagan - 1,080,000
Bill Clinton - 2,530,000
Hillary Clinton - 449,000
Regis Philbin - 52,700
Jennifer Lopez - 2,940,000
Ben Affleck - 766,000
Matt Damon - 390,000
Bill Gates - 2,760,000
Al Gore - 1,770,000 (not bad, until you consider he invented the internet)
But what about historical figures?
George Washington - 3,050,000
Isaac Newton - 583,000
Adolf Hitler - 556,000
Michelangelo - 1,170,000
John F. Kennedy - 2,100,000
Franklin D. Roosevelt - 509,000
Diana, Princess of Wales - 160,000
Mother Teresa - 347,000
Atilla the Hun - 9,600
and, just to keep myself nice and humble
Mike Kinman - 96 (Atilla the Hun is 100 times more popular than me!)
So all through it, Jesus is standing pretty tall. Some get a little close, but none can topple the rabbi from Galilee.
Except one.
One name. One person is so popular that they can actually make the Beatles' claim that she is "bigger than Jesus" (BTW, if you're wondering: The Beatles - 1,790,000; John Lennon - 947,000; Paul McCartney - 743,000; George Harrison - 590,000; Ringo Starr - 220,000 -- all of them together don't add up to Jesus).
It is entirely predictable, but that doesn't stop it from being one of the seven signs of the apocalypse.
In first place, with a whopping 5,440,000 -- beating the savior of the whole world by 130,000, she's not a girl, not yet a woman, she is .....
Britney Spears.
Can you believe it? Britney is more popular than Jesus. Well, of course you can believe it -- any society that can produce the "Nick and Jessica Variety Hour" is capable of making choices like this. But it is enough to curdle your cocoa.
EGR resources and connects the church to embrace what one person, one congregation, one diocese and one church can do to make this mission of global reconciliation happen.
Want to find out more ... check our our website at www.e4gr.org.
"Christ's example is being
demeaned by the church if they ignore the new leprosy,
which is AIDS. The church is the sleeping giant here.
If it wakes up to what's really going on in the rest
of the world, it has a real role to play. If it doesn't,
it will be irrelevant."
- Bono
Episcopalians for 
