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The Dark Ages

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One of the biggest challenges a society can face is the changing of a population’s general thinking and ideologies. In respect to that, a drastic amount of forward thinking changes have been accomplished in the last century. The notion of women having the right to vote, the ending of segregation and the election of a black president were all highly controversial and almost unthinkable during much of human history. These are signs of society’s general thinking changing drastically towards political, philosophical and societal issues. Three men with three different ideologies can be seen as the founding fathers of ideas that fight society’s collective thinking and bring about change. Those men who dared to challenge medieval political and…show more content…
Pico della Mirandola, a renaissance philosopher, wrote a book called, Oration on the dignity of man , which humanists refer to as the humanist manifesto. This book, in a way, led to the first thoughts towards human dignity and questioning our place on earth. One of the main points of the book centers on the notion that human beings aren’t preordained by nature to a center fixture like animals . Our destiny is not determined by anything outside of us. Pico believed that what makes humanity a miracle is that unlike all things in the universe, we have the power to choose our own life’s through freewill. Pico writes from gods point of view, “thou mayest have and possess what abode, what form, and what functions thou thyself shalt desire” . While the main driving point behind Pico’s ideology is freewill, he divulges further into the discussion of human dignity by writing about how humans have the power to “degenerate into the lower forms of life” and “to be reborn into the higher forms” . This was in contrast with the common thinking of human dignity during this period of time. Before Pico wrote this book, most people accepted their place in the universe as a fixture, once born a farmer, always a farmer. Pico wanted to discontinue this common thought, he believed the true beauty in humanity is our ability to choose our own paths . If a man wanted not to be a farmer anymore, he may
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