Hasil untuk "Religions of the world"

Soo-Yeong Jeong , Moo-JinJeong, Jun-Ki Chung

This research aimed to explore the significance of home education within Jewish culture. This study involved existing well-documented data from online interviews with parents and children engaged in home education. The sample included families from various branches of Judaism. Data was collected through semi-structured online interviews. The research results identified the role of religious counselling in shaping children’s religious identity. Home education and religious upbringing remain vital aspects of developing children’s religious and cultural identity in Jewish families. The study determined that home education in eight Jewish families fostered a deeper understanding of religious texts and traditions, while also providing an individualised approach to the study of religion. Religious counselling is provided both formally through Torah lessons and informally through family discussions and participation in religious rituals. Home education is an effective means of transmitting religious faith and traditions in Jewish families. It provides flexibility and opportunities for deep immersion in religious learning, while simultaneously fostering strong intergenerational connections. An analysis of religious and educational documents revealed that Jewish families have a wide range of tools and resources to ensure the religious and general education of their children. To improve support for such families, it is recommended to develop specialised counselling programs and materials for parents who provide home education. The collected data confirmed the hypothesis about the positive impact of home education on the religious identity of children in Jewish families. The data also showed the importance of participation in family rituals and mentoring for the formation of religious beliefs.

Ansh Kumar Sharma, Yixiang Sun, Ninghao Lu et al.

Robot learning from interacting with the physical world is fundamentally bottlenecked by the cost of physical interaction. The two alternatives, supervised finetuning (SFT) from expert demonstrations and reinforcement learning (RL) in a software-based simulator, are limited by the amount of expert data available and the sim-to-real gap for manipulation. With the recent emergence of world models learned from real-world video-action data, we ask the question of whether training a policy in a world model can be more effective than supervised learning or software simulation in achieving better real-robot performance. We propose World-Gymnast, which performs RL finetuning of a vision-language-action (VLA) policy by rolling out the policy in an action-conditioned video world model and rewarding the rollouts with a vision-language model (VLM). On the Bridge robot setup, World-Gymnast outperforms SFT by as much as 18x and outperforms software simulator by as much as 2x. More importantly, World-Gymnast demonstrates intriguing capabilities of RL with a world model, including training on diverse language instructions and novel scenes from the world model, test-time training in a novel scene, and online iterative world model and policy improvement. Our results suggest learning a world model and training robot policies in the cloud could be the key to bridging the gap between robots that work in demonstrations and robots that can work in anyone's household.

Junyoung Seo, Hyunwook Choi, Minkyung Kwon et al.

What if a world simulation model could render not an imagined environment but a city that actually exists? Prior generative world models synthesize visually plausible yet artificial environments by imagining all content. We present Seoul World Model (SWM), a city-scale world model grounded in the real city of Seoul. SWM anchors autoregressive video generation through retrieval-augmented conditioning on nearby street-view images. However, this design introduces several challenges, including temporal misalignment between retrieved references and the dynamic target scene, limited trajectory diversity and data sparsity from vehicle-mounted captures at sparse intervals. We address these challenges through cross-temporal pairing, a large-scale synthetic dataset enabling diverse camera trajectories, and a view interpolation pipeline that synthesizes coherent training videos from sparse street-view images. We further introduce a Virtual Lookahead Sink to stabilize long-horizon generation by continuously re-grounding each chunk to a retrieved image at a future location. We evaluate SWM against recent video world models across three cities: Seoul, Busan, and Ann Arbor. SWM outperforms existing methods in generating spatially faithful, temporally consistent, long-horizon videos grounded in actual urban environments over trajectories reaching hundreds of meters, while supporting diverse camera movements and text-prompted scenario variations.

Giuseppe Benagiano, K. Gemzell-Danielsson, Marwan Habiba et al.

Induced abortion has religious, moral, and cultural dimensions that place it at the center of major ethical debates. The interest of women caught in the middle of this never‐ending controversy requires that a dialogue replaces current confrontation. To promote such dialogue, we decided to write a mini‐series to review important aspects of abortion. First, we will turn to history to explore the root of the controversy, which may enable the disentangling of the complexity of the issue. In the second essay we describe how the 20th century witnessed the progressive legalization of abortion. In the third essay we will articulate how we see the possibility of a common ground between those favoring and those opposing abortion. Induced abortion has been attempted from the dawn of civilization and it is mentioned in Egyptian, Greek, and Roman writings, although the frequency of the practice and its success are not known. The world's principal religions did not view abortion favorably, but the strength of prohibition was not uniform. Within Christianity, the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches are currently totally opposed, whereas Protestant denominations are more nuanced in their disapproval. The anti‐abortion stance of Muslim countries seems to be at variance with the view of the majority of traditional scholars, who would allow abortion in the early stages of pregnancy (up to 4 months, or in the first 40 days). The Orthodox Jewish view bans abortion except when the life of the mother is at risk, whereas Reformed Judaism is more open. Hinduism is also opposed to abortion with few exceptions: severe fetal abnormalities, presence of a life‐threatening condition for the woman, in case of rape or incest. Confucianism stresses the importance of the family and reverence for life but also shows concern and compassion for the welfare of the pregnant woman; these positions are balanced when responding to the challenge of deciding about abortion.

Jiahan Zhang, Muqing Jiang, Nanru Dai et al.

Generative world models (WMs) can now simulate worlds with striking visual realism, which naturally raises the question of whether they can endow embodied agents with predictive perception for decision making. Progress on this question has been limited by fragmented evaluation: most existing benchmarks adopt open-loop protocols that emphasize visual quality in isolation, leaving the core issue of embodied utility unresolved, i.e., do WMs actually help agents succeed at embodied tasks? To address this gap, we introduce World-in-World, the first open platform that benchmarks WMs in a closed-loop world that mirrors real agent-environment interactions. World-in-World provides a unified online planning strategy and a standardized action API, enabling heterogeneous WMs for decision making. We curate four closed-loop environments that rigorously evaluate diverse WMs, prioritize task success as the primary metric, and move beyond the common focus on visual quality; we also present the first data scaling law for world models in embodied settings. Our study uncovers three surprises: (1) visual quality alone does not guarantee task success, controllability matters more; (2) scaling post-training with action-observation data is more effective than upgrading the pretrained video generators; and (3) allocating more inference-time compute allows WMs to substantially improve closed-loop performance.

Fan Wu, Jiacheng Wei, Ruibo Li et al.

Video-based world models have recently garnered increasing attention for their ability to synthesize diverse and dynamic visual environments. In this paper, we focus on shared world modeling, where a model generates multiple videos from a set of input images, each representing the same underlying world in different camera poses. We propose IC-World, a novel generation framework, enabling parallel generation for all input images via activating the inherent in-context generation capability of large video models. We further finetune IC-World via reinforcement learning, Group Relative Policy Optimization, together with two proposed novel reward models to enforce scene-level geometry consistency and object-level motion consistency among the set of generated videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IC-World substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both geometry and motion consistency. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to systematically explore the shared world modeling problem with video-based world models.

Vidya Venkatesan, Aomawa L. Shields, Russell Deitrick et al.

Eccentric planets may spend a significant portion of their orbits at large distances from their host stars, where low temperatures can cause atmospheric CO2 to condense out onto the surface, similar to the polar ice caps on Mars. The radiative effects on the climates of these planets throughout their orbits would depend on the wavelength-dependent albedo of surface CO2 ice that may accumulate at or near apoastron and vary according to the spectral energy distribution of the host star. To explore these possible effects, we incorporated a CO2 ice-albedo parameterization into a one-dimensional energy balance climate model. With the inclusion of this parameterization, our simulations demonstrated that F-dwarf planets require 29% more orbit-averaged flux to thaw out of global water ice cover compared with simulations that solely use a traditional pure water ice-albedo parameterization. When no eccentricity is assumed, and host stars are varied, F-dwarf planets with higher bond albedos relative to their M-dwarf planet counterparts require 30% more orbit-averaged flux to exit a water snowball state. Additionally, the intense heat experienced at periastron aids eccentric planets in exiting a snowball state with a smaller increase in instellation compared with planets on circular orbits; this enables eccentric planets to exhibit warmer conditions along a broad range of instellation. This study emphasizes the significance of incorporating an albedo parameterization for the formation of CO2 ice into climate models to accurately assess the habitability of eccentric planets, as we show that, even at moderate eccentricities, planets with Earth-like atmospheres can reach surface temperatures cold enough for the condensation of CO2 onto their surfaces, as can planets receiving low amounts of instellation on circular orbits.

Jialong Wu, Shaofeng Yin, Ningya Feng et al.

World models predict state transitions in response to actions and are increasingly developed across diverse modalities. However, standard training objectives such as maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) often misalign with task-specific goals of world models, i.e., transition prediction metrics like accuracy or perceptual quality. In this paper, we present RLVR-World, a unified framework that leverages reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to directly optimize world models for such metrics. Despite formulating world modeling as autoregressive prediction of tokenized sequences, RLVR-World evaluates metrics of decoded predictions as verifiable rewards. We demonstrate substantial performance gains on both language- and video-based world models across domains, including text games, web navigation, and robot manipulation. Our work indicates that, beyond recent advances in reasoning language models, RLVR offers a promising post-training paradigm for enhancing the utility of generative models more broadly. Code, datasets, models, and video samples are available at the project website: https://thuml.github.io/RLVR-World.

Ben Szoller

Levente Hufnagel (ed.), Ecotheology: Sustainability and Religions of the World (London: IntechOpen, 2023), xiv + 374 pp., £139.00 (cloth), ISBN: 978-1-80355-436-5.

Moh. Ashif Fuadi, Moh. Mahbub, Nor Huda Ali et al.

This research explains the Islamic revelation in the context of the synergy between fiqh and tradition. Using qualitative methods, this research concludes that: first, the pribumization of Islam is the result of the thought of K.H. Abdurrahman Wahid (Gus Dur) by seeking harmonization between fiqh and tradition. Gus Dur referred to the compromising process of Islamization by the Walisongo in spreading Islam in Nusantara as a very effective instrument or medium in the spreading of Islam. Secondly, in the Islamic Pribumization discourse, Gus Dur used the fiqh methodology of al-'ādah muhakkamah and al-'tsābit bi al-'urf ka al-tsābit bi al-nash, which were seen as capable of paying attention to the needs present in the local culture. For example, the greeting assalamu’alaikum is interpreted in the good morning greeting only in the relationship of mu’amalah, not up to the level of worship, in the custom of marriage by carrying out the conditions of harmony, but still given space in expressing their respective cultures while not contrary to religion. Third, based on its historical flow, religious values within culture in the Pribumization of Islam substantially shifted towards the discourse of Islam Nusantara and are now transformed into one of the indicators of religious moderation, namely accommodating a local culture so that it has a relevant relationship therein.

Seyed Mehdi Taheri

The Indian subcontinent is considered one of the five ancient civilizations in the world and the inheritor of a magnificent and diverse culture. India, as the largest country in this subcontinent, is considered the seventh largest country in the world. Due to its strategic importance, this region has always been favored by people from other parts of the world. Regarding the relationship of other nations, races and religions with the people of the Indian subcontinent, they were able to influence the life and culture of the region. One of the distinctive features of this region is the existence of different religions and religious sects, among which Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam are the most important religions of the region. The mentioned religions have many sects in the region, and one of the important Islamic sects is Sufism, which has established a positive interaction with other religions by becoming indigenous in the subcontinent and peacefully coexisting. In this article, after discussing the potentials and capacities of the subcontinent region, the author tries to investigate issues such as the importance of peaceful coexistence in Islam, interring in Islam and Sufism to the subcontinent, different sects of Sufism and its peaceful coexistence with other religions. In this regard, the author believes that Sufism was able to influence Hindu seekers through familiarity with philosophical works, the type of worldview and interaction with mystics and also through the peaceful coexistence emphasized by Islam. By taking advantage of good morals, decent behavior and the call to philanthropy derived from Islam, not only did they gain great influence among the common people, but beyond that, throughout history, they were able to attract the devotion of kings and gain a lot of power in the courts of some rulers of India.

Vjollca DIBRA, Fatlum JASHARI

A lot of authors come to us in the history of the world literature, whose works have placed women as their main characters. Without pretending to do typology of such works, how could I not remember Shehrazad of Arab tales 1001 nights, Safo of sensitive lyrics of Lesbosit Emma Bovary of Gustave Flaubert, Ana Karenina of L. N. Tolstoy, Nana of Emile Zola, Geishas of Jasunari Kawabata and up to those who, although they were not the main characters, they turned into symbols as Penelope of Homer's Odyssey, Desdemona, Lady Macbeth and Juliet of W. Shakespeare. If you follow even further towards the genesis of female character - a woman, according to the biblical theme, appears in the form of Eve - Hava, out of the rib of Adam - the innocent "fault" of the loss of Eden. This "curse" accompanies him everywhere through ages, countries, nations, races and religions. In a sociological sense, the female character even becomes an emanation of a social order, of the matriarchy period, and in that aspect no longer feels inferior to its status in the history of mankind. Different non- governmental organizations and organizations for the protection of women's rights and freedoms or gender equality, whether legally recognized by the legal mechanisms of individual states, or whether within the framework of the UN, supported by International Convention on Human Rights and Freedoms, are just a correctional effort of the chauvinist male tendencies and of the political oligarchy of corruption in various parts of the world.

Klaus M. Frahm, Dima L. Shepelyansky

We analyze the Google matrix of directed networks of Wikipedia articles related to 8 recent Wikipedia language editions representing different cultures (English, Arabic, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Chinese). Using the reduced Google matrix algorithm we determine relations and interactions of 23 society concepts and 17 religions represented by their respective articles for each of the 8 editions. The effective Markov transitions are found to be more intense inside the two blocks of society concepts and religions while transitions between the blocks are significantly reduced. We establish 5 poles of influence for society concepts (Law, Society, Communism, Liberalism, Capitalism) as well as 5 poles for religions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Chinese folk religion) and determine how they affect other entries. We compute inter edition correlations for different key quantities providing a quantitative analysis of the differences or the proximity of views of the 8 cultures with respect to the selected society concepts and religions.

Taiming Lu, Tianmin Shu, Alan Yuille et al.

Planning with partial observation is a central challenge in embodied AI. A majority of prior works have tackled this challenge by developing agents that physically explore their environment to update their beliefs about the world state. In contrast, humans can $\textit{imagine}$ unseen parts of the world through a mental exploration and $\textit{revise}$ their beliefs with imagined observations. Such updated beliefs can allow them to make more informed decisions, without necessitating the physical exploration of the world at all times. To achieve this human-like ability, we introduce the $\textit{Generative World Explorer (Genex)}$, an egocentric world exploration framework that allows an agent to mentally explore a large-scale 3D world (e.g., urban scenes) and acquire imagined observations to update its belief. This updated belief will then help the agent to make a more informed decision at the current step. To train $\textit{Genex}$, we create a synthetic urban scene dataset, Genex-DB. Our experimental results demonstrate that (1) $\textit{Genex}$ can generate high-quality and consistent observations during long-horizon exploration of a large virtual physical world and (2) the beliefs updated with the generated observations can inform an existing decision-making model (e.g., an LLM agent) to make better plans.

Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco, Amanda Cercas Curry, Susanna Paoli et al.

Emotions play important epistemological and cognitive roles in our lives, revealing our values and guiding our actions. Previous work has shown that LLMs display biases in emotion attribution along gender lines. However, unlike gender, which says little about our values, religion, as a socio-cultural system, prescribes a set of beliefs and values for its followers. Religions, therefore, cultivate certain emotions. Moreover, these rules are explicitly laid out and interpreted by religious leaders. Using emotion attribution, we explore how different religions are represented in LLMs. We find that: Major religions in the US and European countries are represented with more nuance, displaying a more shaded model of their beliefs. Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism are strongly stereotyped. Judaism and Islam are stigmatized -- the models' refusal skyrocket. We ascribe these to cultural bias in LLMs and the scarcity of NLP literature on religion. In the rare instances where religion is discussed, it is often in the context of toxic language, perpetuating the perception of these religions as inherently toxic. This finding underscores the urgent need to address and rectify these biases. Our research underscores the crucial role emotions play in our lives and how our values influence them.

K. Lehkykh

The article analyzes the influence of world religions on the awareness of the need to consider the principle of truth in the process of making Court decisions as a relevant scientific issue, the solution of which will allow establishing ideological grounds for the implementation of moral principles through justice. The author analyzes specific religious norms of the pre-state period, Christian beliefs, Judaism, norms of Muslim law, Buddhism. Taking into account the review, conclusions regarding the influence of world religions on the awareness of the need consider the principle of truth in the process of making Court decisions are formulated. Religions are the ideological basis for the implementation of moral principles through justice, based on the socio-ethical and cultural systems of their dissemination. Common to all religious dogmas is the need to protect against the basic violations embodied in the commandment; the definition of “evil” by specific religions and the cultivation of its eradication, both by the person himself or herself and through the bodies endowed with the right to administer justice. Religion also obliges a person to obey and take for granted what is unfair and wrong for an individual, promises rewards for suffering in another life, imposes duties for past sins, or promises to punish those responsible for injustice with “bad karma” in the future. The very semantics of the concepts of justice are contextually distinctive in different religious, historical, and socio-cultural systems. The etymological origin of the concept of “justice” is much more complex for a cohesive conceptualization and is derived from such meanings as coercion, fear, violence, and necessity. Justice in the context of asserting justice can be considered in various categories, notably it must be an unbiased assessment of circumstances based on the “truth” on the basis of equality of the parties, and as our research demonstrates – as a tool for creating safe and harmonious environment for the existence of society. Justice is deemed to be a certain standard of established truth, cultivated by religious norms that are partly beneficial to the authorities. Accordingly, we can define the relativity of the concepts of “just” or “unfair”, since they can be considered both through the Aristotelian suum cuique (to each his own), and through the principle of equality and impartiality, as well as a means of influencing society to ensure its security and (or) the interests of the authorities.

Hamzeh Ali Islaminasab, Hamid Moridian

SUBJECT & OBJECTIVES: The emergent spiritualities have a special and new look at man and his relationship with the Almighty God, leading to humanism in some cases. Deepak Chopra believes man has a lot of ability due to his mind and he can know God without the need for divine religions. He can also behave like God and participate in the creation of the Universe with the Almighty God and control the material world and the universe. On the other hand, Mulla Sadra considers all human abilities to be related to his Nafs (soul), which can possess abilities and dominate existence if connected to God Almighty.METHOD & FINDING: This article is a critical research answering the question of what the position of humans in the universe is. The findings of the research show that Chopra imagined that divine religions were created to nurture and develop human abilities, especially the physical type; While the purpose of divine religions is the spiritual evolution of man.CONCLUSION: Using the qualitative method in the analysis of Chopra's writings based on Mulla Sadra's views, we can draw the following conclusion: Although man is composed of two domains, Nafs (soul) and the body, his most important domain is his soul, for which, although man has abilities, his abilities are due to his connection to the Almighty God.

Andrii Voshchepynets, Oleksiy Agapitov, Lynn Wilson et al.

We present the results of processing the effects of the powerful Gamma Ray Burst GRB221009A captured by the charged particle detectors (electrostatic analyzers and solid-state detectors) onboard spacecraft at different points in the heliosphere on October 9, 2022. To follow the GRB221009A propagation through the heliosphere we used the electron and proton flux measurements from solar missions Solar Orbiter and STEREO-A; Earth magnetosphere and the solar wind missions THEMIS and Wind; meteorological satellites POES15, POES19, MetOp3; and MAVEN - a NASA mission orbiting Mars. GRB221009A had a structure of four bursts: less intense Pulse 1 - the triggering impulse - was detected by gamma-ray observatories at 131659 UT (near the Earth); the most intense Pulses 2 and 3 were detected on board all the spacecraft from the list, and Pulse 4 detected in more than 500 s after Pulse 1. Due to their different scientific objectives, the spacecraft, which data was used in this study, were separated by more than 1 AU (Solar Orbiter and MAVEN). This enabled tracking GRB221009A as it was propagating across the heliosphere. STEREO-A was the first to register Pulse 2 and 3 of the GRB, almost 100 seconds before their detection by spacecraft in the vicinity of Earth. MAVEN detected GRB221009A Pulses 2, 3, and 4 at the orbit of Mars about 237 seconds after their detection near Earth. By processing the time delays observed we show that the source location of the GRB221009A was at RA 288.5 degrees, Dec 18.5 degrees (J2000) with an error cone of 2 degrees

Aleksey I. Belkin, Eugenie V. Mochalov

Introduction. The practical significance of the anthropological concept of the sacred books of world religions is outlined. Four issues are identified, due to which the system of ideas of a concept of a person is reflected in the sacred text, and which are relevant in modern society. Materials and Methods. The object and subject of research are determined, and the main sources on which the research is based are indicated. The main methods are textological, historical hermeneutics, descriptive and comparative historical analysis. Results. The objects of analysis in relation to the Buddhist concept of man are the categories of “samadhi”, “insight”, the doctrine of the five virtues developing in the process of meditation, the doctrine of the essence of the five skandhas. It is shown the influence of these categories on the specifics of solving the main ideological problem – the attitude of a person to the world. In considering the biblical concept of man, the concept of “life” is defined as the key one. The subject of the analysis was the inconsistency of man’s position in the world. It is also shown the importance of ethical teaching for the study of contradictory human nature and determination of the purpose of man. When analyzing the views on the problem of man contained in the Koran, the significance of the idea of human creation and the key importance of the idea of obedience to Allah in understanding the way of life and the system of ethical norms and principles are shown. Discussion and Conclusion. The difference in approaches to the interpretation of the problem of a person in the Tripitaka, the Bible and the Koran is reflected. In Buddhism, the development of supra-natural “subtle principles” through the practice of meditation leading a person to nirvana comes to the fore. In the Christian concept, the fundamental is the idea of the dualism of human existence and the salvation of the soul. Islam develops the concept of initial unconditional obedience to Allah. It is shown the ratio of key categories and ideas related to understanding a person in Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. The attention is drawn to the scope of application of the research results.

Ruslan Ruslan, Muhammad A. Burga, Muli U. Noer

Indonesia has the biggest Muslim population globally, and one of the Islamic beliefs among people of this nation is tarekat, which is sometimes considered as a heretic. Therefore, this article aims to analyse the meaning of diction tarekat according to the Qur’an and its implications for the Buginese community, one of the oldest ethnicities in Indonesia. This is a conceptual and empirical research with the purposive sampling method used to determine the informants from several tarekat leaders and congregations. Data were collected through documentation, observation and interviews and analysed using Miles and Huberman’s qualitative analysis technique. This process consists of data reduction, display and drawing conclusions. The study results showed that, firstly, the word tarekat in the Qur’an indicates the meaning of inner journey and the methods and ways of thinking, acting and behaving. Secondly, to the Buginese community, it implies a spiritual path to a higher level of appreciation towards their God. Thirdly, the meaning of the diction tarekat in the Qur’an has implications for its understanding, which can be seen in the practice of dhikr, spiritual behaviour and the way of life of those implementing these heretics. Contribution: This article enriched the religious belief among Muslims, which scholars rarely uncover. Adherents of Islam in Indonesia have a social and political responsibility regarding religious tolerance within and outside other religions. This proves that Muslims contribute to world peace in Middle-East and South-Eastern Asia.