Giovanni Pico della Mirandola Quotes
But in its final creation it was not the part of the Father's power to fail as though exhausted. It was not the part of His wisdom to waver in a needful matter through poverty of counsel.
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni. "Oration on the Dignity of Man." Translated by Elizabeth Livermore Forbes. The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, edited by Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall Jr., University of Chicago Press, 1948, p. 224.
At the time, it was very difficult for people who had been taught all their lives that God was directly responsible for the creation to accept the notion of evolution. At the time, there was not the overwhelming evidence proving Darwin’s theory that we have today. Nor did theologians realize that evolution and Darwinism were not inconsistent with the concept of a creator and supreme being. Nonetheless, there are still those who, like Agassiz, reject evolution and insist that the Biblical version of creation is literally true. See {586990}. Then there are people who have come up with the concept of Intelligent Design which originated with Agassiz though he never called it that. Most religious people today, in contrast, see no conflict in natural selection as described by Darwin and later proven, and the concept of God. They see the Biblical creation as metaphorical and natural selection as the product of an omniscient supreme being.
“Qur’an” is another way of spelling “Koran”. The belief in the perfection of the Koran is fairly common in Islamic nations. If Sharia is the civil law, as many Muslims insist that it is or should be, then there is no system of amendment and nothing that has occurred or has been learned since 800 AD that is any reason to improve or modify the law. Modern Islamic nations cope with this problem in one of three ways. The Fundamentalists take the Koran literally in all things and nothing is ever amended or modernized. Modernists will treat the Koran and Sharia as metaphorical and interpret it in the light of the modern world. More secular nations (like Turkey and Indonesia) reject Sharia as a civil legal system or as a source of inspiration of civil law.
Amen ho tep IV. This Pharaoh adopted a monotheistic religion and imposed it upon Egypt where he could. However, as soon as he died, he was painted as a criminal for the heretical view of monotheism. It is not known whether he came upon the monotheistic concept independently or was influenced by the Jews who had first promulgated the idea. Some argue that Akhenaton was not a strict monotheist because for required the worship of the one God, Aten, but did not ban the worship of the other Egyptian gods though he personally, and his wife Nefertiti, were monotheistic.
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was an Italian Renaissance nobleman and philosopher. He is famed for the events of 1486, when, at the age of 23, he proposed to defend 900 theses on religion, philosophy, natural philosophy, and magic against all comers, for which he wrote the Oration on the Dignity of Man, which has been called the "Manifesto of the Renaissance", and a key text of Renaissance humanism and of what has been called the "Hermetic Reformation". He was the founder of the tradition of Christian Kabbalah, a key tenet of early modern Western esotericism. The 900 Theses was the first printed book to be universally banned by the Church.
