Hasil untuk "Religions of the world"

Associate Professor, Dr. Theodore U. Dickson, Innocentia Nkeiruka Charles

This article examines Genesis 38:8-10, focusing on the motivation for Onan’s action and its ethical and theological implications for contemporary discussions on family planning and contraception. It explores the levirate marriage system in ancient Israel, the cultural significance of childbearing, and the moral dimensions of Onan's actions within the context of societal and divine expectations. The article further investigates theological perspectives on contraception, addressing debates on the ethical use of family planning methods, including the withdrawal method, within the framework of biblical teachings. The study utilized exegetical tools to analyze the textual and contextual dimensions of Genesis 38:8-10. A close reading of Genesis 38:8-10, with particular attention to the Hebrew term shāḥat, reveals Onan's deliberate violation of familial and communal obligations, leading to divine judgment. Onan’s punishment was rooted not only in his act of withdrawal but also in his self-serving intentions and his neglect of his levirate duty, which had adverse effects on Er’s lineage, Tamar’s inheritance, and her future within Judah’s family. Furthermore, Onan's persistent act of withdrawal, without mutual consent, exploited Tamar's vulnerability and femininity. The study highlights the importance of mutual consent, moral responsibility, and stewardship in marital relationships, offering a nuanced understanding of the biblical mandate to "be fruitful and multiply." By integrating historical exegesis with modern ethical considerations, the study provides actionable insights for Christians navigating family planning decisions in light of faith and morality. This analysis contributes to the ongoing discourse on the intersection of theology, ethics, and reproductive health, advocating for informed and compassionate approaches to family planning that honor both biblical principles and contemporary realities.

David Bunbunan Hasibuan, Yonas Muanley, Yohanes Sihombing et al.

The aim of this study is to examine the Johannine affirmation that “God is love” through the philosophical categories of metaphysics, epistemology, and ontology, in order to elucidate how love and justice are revealed in divine self-disclosure. Methodologically, the analysis follows a sequential reading of the Fourth Gospel in dialogue with classical philosophical branches: beginning with metaphysical claims that the Logos is eternally with God and is God; proceeding to epistemological concerns expressed in the Incarnation as the medium of divine revelation; and culminating in ontological reflection on human existence as contingent upon the creative act of the Logos. The study concludes that divine love is both essential and eternal within God’s being yet becomes ontologically communicable through the Logos’ mediating role. The article contributes to scholarship by demonstrating how the Gospel of John provides a philosophical-theological synthesis in which faith in the incarnate Logos enables humanity to participate in divine filiation, thereby integrating love and justice as fundamental coordinates of revelation. This study positions the Logos as the central axis uniting divine love (agape) and justice (dikaiosyne), offering a novel metaphysical-theological framework that reconceptualizes the Logos as a dynamic mediator of God’s attributes. It provides a hermeneutical method for interpreting Scripture that highlights the interplay of love and justice and offers ethically grounded guidance for human action, bridging philosophy, theology, and practical ethics in contemporary contexts.

Yiming Guan, Rui Yu, John Zhang et al.

Agents operating in complex software environments benefit from reasoning about the consequences of their actions, as even a single incorrect user interface (UI) operation can derail long, artifact-preserving workflows. This challenge is particularly acute for computer-using scenarios, where real execution does not support counterfactual exploration, making large-scale trial-and-error learning and planning impractical despite the environment being fully digital and deterministic. We introduce the Computer-Using World Model (CUWM), a world model for desktop software that predicts the next UI state given the current state and a candidate action. CUWM adopts a two-stage factorization of UI dynamics: it first predicts a textual description of agent-relevant state changes, and then realizes these changes visually to synthesize the next screenshot. CUWM is trained on offline UI transitions collected from agents interacting with real Microsoft Office applications, and further refined with a lightweight reinforcement learning stage that aligns textual transition predictions with the structural requirements of computer-using environments. We evaluate CUWM via test-time action search, where a frozen agent uses the world model to simulate and compare candidate actions before execution. Across a range of Office tasks, world-model-guided test-time scaling improves decision quality and execution robustness.

Figen Balamir, Selman Yılmaz

Physical and mental health are fundamental human needs, yet modern medicine cannot always preserve them. At this point, alternative and complementary medical approaches sometimes offer significant contributions. In this context, religious healing stands out as a practice that plays a complementary role in many cultures and is frequently relied on, although it often faces criticism from the perspective of official religious doctrine. This study examines the phenomenon of “religious healing” from a sociological perspective. The provinces of Iğdır, Ağrı, and Erzurum, located in eastern Türkiye, were selected for the fieldwork. Interviews were conducted with 31 individuals who sought religious healing. The main purpose of this article is to understand the motivations of individuals who participate in such practices and how their healing experiences are transformed into religious experiences. The field data indicate that religious healing commonly involves practices such as recitation and blowing of the Qur’an, drinking blessed water, and the preparation of amulets. Feelings of helplessness and fear of social stigma are prominent in participants’ reasons for resorting to religious healers. The participants’ turn to healers can be seen as a defense mechanism, shifting blame to external forces like the evil eye, jinn, and magic, thereby reducing personal responsibility. Religion was instrumentalized to make the behavior of applying to a healer reasonable and acceptable.

Edi Suranta Ginting, Slamet Triadi, David Ming

Mount Sinabung started to erupt on September of 2010. This event shocked the Karonese living around the mountain. Therefore, they held various rituals to limit bad luck combined with offering sacrifices according to traditional Karonese traditional practices, in the hope that Mount Sinabung would finally calm down. Despite the official prohibition declared by the church, many Karonese Christians still carry out suchrituals. The Karonese people, are an ethnic group from North Sumatra, Indonesia, and they have a very rich tradition of Christian faith, particularly in Protestant denominations. The rituals, for them, are however based on ancestral inheritance, and they believe that rituals can be a way to bring the almighty to provide help for the problems people may face in various situations of often dire stress. Through this paper, the author intends to contemporary literature review to find answers on how Karonese Christians should respond to natural disasters, such as the eruption of Mount Sinabung, especially bearing in mind the role of Christian rituals within a contextual theology approach. Contextual theology utilized local culture to view the problems faced by people in this study. This paper asserts that Christian rituals can indeed assist Karonese Christians in responding to natural disasters by providing spiritual, emotional, and communal support that aligns with their cultural and religious beliefs and practices.

Zhen Li, Chuanhao Li, Xiaofeng Mao et al.

Video generation techniques have made remarkable progress, promising to be the foundation of interactive world exploration. However, existing video generation datasets are not well-suited for world exploration training as they suffer from some limitations: limited locations, short duration, static scenes, and a lack of annotations about exploration and the world. In this paper, we introduce Sekai (meaning "world" in Japanese), a high-quality first-person view worldwide video dataset with rich annotations for world exploration. It consists of over 5,000 hours of walking or drone view (FPV and UVA) videos from over 100 countries and regions across 750 cities. We develop an efficient and effective toolbox to collect, pre-process and annotate videos with location, scene, weather, crowd density, captions, and camera trajectories. Comprehensive analyses and experiments demonstrate the dataset's scale, diversity, annotation quality, and effectiveness for training video generation models. We believe Sekai will benefit the area of video generation and world exploration, and motivate valuable applications. The project page is https://lixsp11.github.io/sekai-project/.

Ningwei Xie, Zizi Tian, Lei Yang et al.

World models have garnered increasing attention in the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI), serving as computational frameworks for learning representations of the external world and forecasting future states. While early efforts focused on 2D visual perception and simulation, recent 3D-aware generative world models have demonstrated the ability to synthesize geometrically consistent, interactive 3D environments, marking a shift toward 3D spatial cognition. Despite rapid progress, the field lacks systematic analysis to categorize emerging techniques and clarify their roles in advancing 3D cognitive world models. This survey addresses this need by introducing a conceptual framework, providing a structured and forward-looking review of world models transitioning from 2D perception to 3D cognition. Within this framework, we highlight two key technological drivers, particularly advances in 3D representations and the incorporation of world knowledge, as fundamental pillars. Building on these, we dissect three core cognitive capabilities that underpin 3D world modeling: 3D physical scene generation, 3D spatial reasoning, and 3D spatial interaction. We further examine the deployment of these capabilities in real-world applications, including embodied AI, autonomous driving, digital twin, and gaming/VR. Finally, we identify challenges across data, modeling, and deployment, and outline future directions for advancing more robust and generalizable 3D world models.

NVIDIA, :, Niket Agarwal et al.

Physical AI needs to be trained digitally first. It needs a digital twin of itself, the policy model, and a digital twin of the world, the world model. In this paper, we present the Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform to help developers build customized world models for their Physical AI setups. We position a world foundation model as a general-purpose world model that can be fine-tuned into customized world models for downstream applications. Our platform covers a video curation pipeline, pre-trained world foundation models, examples of post-training of pre-trained world foundation models, and video tokenizers. To help Physical AI builders solve the most critical problems of our society, we make Cosmos open-source and our models open-weight with permissive licenses available via https://github.com/nvidia-cosmos/cosmos-predict1.

Eli J. Laird, Corey Clark

World models enable agents to plan within imagined environments by predicting future states conditioned on past observations and actions. However, their ability to plan over long horizons is limited by the effective memory span of the backbone architecture. This limitation leads to perceptual drift in long rollouts, hindering the model's capacity to perform loop closures within imagined trajectories. In this work, we investigate the effective memory span of transformer-based world models through an analysis of several memory augmentation mechanisms. We introduce a taxonomy that distinguishes between memory encoding and memory injection mechanisms, motivating their roles in extending the world model's memory through the lens of residual stream dynamics. Using a state recall evaluation task, we measure the memory recall of each mechanism and analyze its respective trade-offs. Our findings show that memory mechanisms improve the effective memory span in vision transformers and provide a path to completing loop closures within a world model's imagination.

Yuanhui Huang, Weiliang Chen, Wenzhao Zheng et al.

World models have garnered increasing attention for comprehensive modeling of the real world. However, most existing methods still rely on pixel-aligned representations as the basis for world evolution, neglecting the inherent 3D nature of the physical world. This could undermine the 3D consistency and diminish the modeling efficiency of world models. In this paper, we present Terra, a native 3D world model that represents and generates explorable environments in an intrinsic 3D latent space. Specifically, we propose a novel point-to-Gaussian variational autoencoder (P2G-VAE) that encodes 3D inputs into a latent point representation, which is subsequently decoded as 3D Gaussian primitives to jointly model geometry and appearance. We then introduce a sparse point flow matching network (SPFlow) for generating the latent point representation, which simultaneously denoises the positions and features of the point latents. Our Terra enables exact multi-view consistency with native 3D representation and architecture, and supports flexible rendering from any viewpoint with only a single generation process. Furthermore, Terra achieves explorable world modeling through progressive generation in the point latent space. We conduct extensive experiments on the challenging indoor scenes from ScanNet v2. Terra achieves state-of-the-art performance in both reconstruction and generation with high 3D consistency.

Wandong Sun, Long Chen, Yongbo Su et al.

Humanoid robots are designed to navigate environments accessible to humans using their legs. However, classical research has primarily focused on controlled laboratory settings, resulting in a gap in developing controllers for navigating complex real-world terrains. This challenge mainly arises from the limitations and noise in sensor data, which hinder the robot's understanding of itself and the environment. In this study, we introduce World Model Reconstruction (WMR), an end-to-end learning-based approach for blind humanoid locomotion across challenging terrains. We propose training an estimator to explicitly reconstruct the world state and utilize it to enhance the locomotion policy. The locomotion policy takes inputs entirely from the reconstructed information. The policy and the estimator are trained jointly; however, the gradient between them is intentionally cut off. This ensures that the estimator focuses solely on world reconstruction, independent of the locomotion policy's updates. We evaluated our model on rough, deformable, and slippery surfaces in real-world scenarios, demonstrating robust adaptability and resistance to interference. The robot successfully completed a 3.2 km hike without any human assistance, mastering terrains covered with ice and snow.

Françoise Van Haeperen

Les premieres attestations du culte de Mithra a Poetovio vers le milieu du IIe siecle de notre ere, emanant d’esclaves au service du portorium, sont analysees en les situant dans leur contexte, notamment topographique et social. Un examen serre de la documentation permet d’emettre l’hypothese que des agents du portorium ont introduit le culte de Mithra a Poetovio, a partir d’Aquileia.

Sigit Hardiyanto, Faisal Eriza, Hatta Ridho et al.

Indonesia's efforts to make the country the center of the halal industry give theological and religious perspectives an essential role when making critical decisions. The Fatwa of the Indonesian Ulema Council on halal products has an influence that is believed to guide and foster the Muslim faith in Indonesia. This study aims to look at the implications of the Fatwa of the Indonesian Ulema Council on halal products in Indonesia, which affect the beliefs of Muslims in Indonesia. The research method used was a descriptive qualitative approach. Data collection was conducted through document study related to the research context. The data analysis technique was done by data reduction, data presentation, and conclusion drawing. The results showed that although the Fatwa of the Indonesian Ulema Council on halal products is not legally binding, Muslim communities in Indonesia believe and are attached to the Fatwa as part of carrying out religious orders. Fatwa implications affect the religiosity, spirituality, and inclusiveness of Muslim beliefs in Indonesia about halal products with the involvement of Ulama. The Indonesian Ulema Council's Fatwa on halal products is vital in the halal industry in Indonesia, which is believed to show obedience in carrying out the teachings of Islam and is vital when viewed theologically.

Stephanie Giselle Nicolaides - Doctoral candidate, Alexander George Nicolaides

This article delves into the parallel natures of both the divine law and animal rights within the religious contexts of the Old and New Testaments. Employing a comparative approach, the paper inspects the developing perspectives on the treatment of animals in biblical scriptures, shedding light on the ethical and legal dimensions embedded in religious teachings. The study investigates key subtopics such as sacrificial rituals and moral imperatives, providing a nuanced understanding of the historical development of attitudes towards animals. Additionally, the analysis of this article encompasses ethical considerations, legal implications, and societal attitudes towards animals, drawing connections between ancient laws and contemporary discourse. Moreover, this article will look at the contemporary needs of society and how religious discourse and juristic principles can be applied to ensure the safety and rights of animals.

Christopher J. Insole

James Sterba has presented a powerful and existentially sincere form of the problem of evil, arguing that it is logically impossible for God to exist, given that there are powerful moral requirements to prevent evil, where one can, and that these requirements would bind an all-powerful and good God, who would indeed be able to prevent such evil. The ‘Kantian’ argument that I set out, if accepted, would undermine the following stage of Sterba’s argument: Significant and especially horrendous evil consequences of immoral actions do obtain all around us, which, if God exists, would have to be through his permission. The Kantian argument will hold that we are able to believe that, in some sense, such horrendous evil consequences do not really obtain, although they appear to. The claim is not that the Kantian argument is ‘persuasive’, but that if some Kantian assumptions are granted, we do have a response to Sterba, which throws open a different way of looking at things. I conclude with some more informal reflections on what we might take away from the Kantian argument, even if we do not accept the deep assumptions, or the progression of the argument. I will not worry too much about demonstrating that this is a ‘correct reading’ of Kant, although I think it is.

Michał Oleksowicz, Michał Kłosowski

This paper revisits one of the most difficult theological issues, namely God’s infinite goodness and the presence of pain and suffering in the natural world. We deepen the understanding of this problem by referring to the philosophical notion of the intelligibility of the world. We argue that pain and suffering are present in biological evolution as a “structural necessity” for the development of more complex structures from simpler ones. The struggle for existence works as a necessary condition for the development of a sophisticated order of nature at the expense of an increase in pain and suffering. If this is so, arguments justifying the ways of a good, omniscient, and omnipotent God in a world where evil and suffering are widespread seem to be undercut. Therefore, we argue that the astonishing intelligibility of nature may help to open our understanding of whatever nature may reveal of itself. This notion—analyzed from ontic and epistemic perspectives—seems to be crucial in reflecting the evolving world, not only from the scientific point of view but also from the theological one.

GP Harianto, Benjamin Metekohy, Novita Sahertian et al.

Servants of God who serve in the Church use world standards to manage the church. This research sought to find answers regarding the characteristics of honor Dei (God's honor), service learning in the Church, and honor Dei as learning the need for respect from the Servant of God in the Church. This study used literature research and its findings were: (1) Honor Dei comes from God. Ministers of the faith must honor God in what you do. John 14:21 says, “Those who accept my commandments and obey them are the ones who love me.” The values of God's honor: grace from God, purity of Faith, teaching love, and preaching the Gospel. So the value of Dei's honorarium must become a curriculum in the church. (2) Service learning in the Church means ecclesiastical learning to see the behavior or character of the association of believers in God's deeds. (3) Learning honor Dei as learning the need for respect from God's servants is not serving in the church with the objective of gaining worldly honor but one is rather is obliged to live out God's honor within himself or herself: (a) learning the lifestyle of the purity of faith of God's servants. (b) learning the honorary lifestyle of God's servants in teaching love, (c) learning the honorary lifestyle of God's servants in church service, and (d) learning the honorary lifestyle of God's servants as preachers of the Gospel. The implications are that with the formulation of honor Dei learning, God's servant in managing the church use God's touch of honor and can become an example for the spiritual growth of the congregation by doing certain things and living a certain way that is pleasing to God. This means inter alia, learning the honorary lifestyle of God's servants in teaching love; learning the honorary lifestyle of God's servants in church service; learning the honorary lifestyle of God's servants as preachers of the Holy Gospel.

Mohammad Amir Ahmadzadeh, Farhad Baradar shad

During the constitutional period changes, a new force emerged that and played an important role in the awakening of the people, familiarization with the West, and the publishing of the press, and also thought for a way out of the upcoming deadlocks. Iranian intellectuals came to understand Iran's backwardness through familiarity with the ideas of the new world, and by proposing and publishing new issues in Iranian society, they established different poles of thought that led to the mixing and even opposition of tradition and modernity. The epistemology of the reforms and the explanation of this new reading from thought to the fulfillment of an important precondition is stopped, and that is the knowledge of intellectuals and the fundamental components of their thought. This research, with a thought-oriented approach and documentary content analysis method, deals with the purposeful rereading of the works of Afrasiab Azad, the founder of Hezb Khuda and a traditionalist intellectual of the constitutional and Pahlavi periods, and by evaluating it through the logic of Skinner's contextual approach, In search of an answer to this central question, how is the position of nationalism in the works of Afrasiab Azad and its metamorphosis compared to his contemporaries and contemporaries, and how does this flow contribute to the establishment of the Pahlavi government? Free thoughts are evaluated in the context of the modernist thought of contemporary thinkers.The documents of Afrasiab Azad are available in the sources of purchase documents and in the form of about a thousand files in the repository of documents and national archives. A small number of documents attributed to Afrasiab Azad are available in the Library of the Islamic Council and the Astan Quds Razavi Document Center and have been indexed. An autopsy of a political gathering related to the bread riot in December 1942/Azar 1321 in Tehran has quoted an article about Afrasiab Azad's speech in this context. He has also mentioned the effect of modernization and de-religion in the chapter of westernized plays in relation to the conditions of this art in the first Pahlavi period and the important role of Afrasiab Azad as one of the initiators of the play. The purpose of this study is to put Azad's key concepts in the cultural and discourse contexts from which they were formed with Skinner's method, so that the advantage and validity of his thought can be put to the test. The aim of Skinner's methodology is to enable us to recover the historical identity and genealogy of each such intellectual history text. The guide to the content analysis of the data in this research based on this approach is, on the one hand, the internal logic of the intellectuals' thought system as a whole and a text, and on the other hand, measuring it with the external logic and comparing it with contemporary publications and press - including the magazine Iranshahr, Kaveh and Aindeh- will take place and the focal point is to pay attention to the recognition of opinions and goals, ideas and the thought system of Afrasiab Azad.The findings of the research aim to prove the hypothesis that the association of intellectuals from the intellectual spectrum of Afrasiab Azad led to the expansion of the acceptance of the discourse of authoritarian nationalism and the theorization of the legitimacy of the first Pahlavi government. With the reduction of modern components in the eyes of Azad in the atmosphere of political and intellectual obstruction of the Reza Shahi era, his influential social and political positions declined. In his works and publications, Afrasiab Azad was introduced as an orator, a freedom-seeker and a modernist of the post-constitutional era, who was later introduced as a writer, lawyer and playwright of the political and social genre. He used the ideas of modernism in his opinions to seek transformation along with the tradition and he believed in a form of moderate or reductionist modernism, which at the same time accepted the new concepts of antiquity and nationalism, and religion as well. He saw the base of social mobility and ethnic solidarity in the special political and social conditions of the post-constitutional period. This approach was interpreted and propagated in the service of authoritarian nationalism at the level of the government superstructure and the national unity of ethnicities and religions at the level of the people and the subalterns in order to gain legitimacy. Gradually, the modern ideas were transformed in his opinions and works and with the establishment of Pahlavi I, he only focused on describing and theorizing the existing conditions and the failure of the primary elements. The reduction and transformation of these ideas and accompanying the first Pahlavi government by Afrasiab Azad during the political and intellectual blockage of the Reza Shahi era, turned him into a messenger of the government's official discourse and led to the loss of his influential social and political base and the decline of his role. In the society of writers, a new idea was created.

Guoping Li

The spirit-writing (<i>fuluan</i> 扶鸞 or <i>fuji</i> 扶乩) movement was a response to modern crises in the domain of Chinese popular religion. From the nineteenth century, spirit-writing cults sprang up throughout China and became a national religious trend. These cults were centered around moral reform promoted through spirit-writing and aimed to reorient traditional values. This article focuses on how the Chinese conceptualized modern crises as <i>jie</i> 劫 by means of spirit-writing, expounded crises in the local context, and reacted to these ideas and crises in their religious and social practices. In the Chaozhou region, the movement arose in the context of disasters, political chaos, and the transmission of foreign culture and religions from the late nineteenth century. Chaozhou spirit-writing cults discoursed on the concept of <i>jie</i> as their doctrinal foundation and endeavored to save the world by receiving moral revelations from deities. They regarded doing good deeds as a way of cultivation and urged people to perform good deeds to avert disasters. Through the planchette, they expounded the meaning of good deeds and enriched their crisis theories in their religious practice. The movement demonstrated the initiative of popular religion, interpreting and reacting to modern crises by using traditional soteriological notions and practices.

S. Mawlood

The unusual rapid change of globalization process, winning of extreme right parties in some countries, who ask for racism and refuse other nationalities and races makes the world unstable and coexistence among various nations is in dangerous. All these things does not come to exist without any plan of some extremist parties, subversive activities in different places. Physical terrorism and terrorist acts are semi controlled, but the extreme groups nowadays found other ways to terrorize societies, frighten and threaten people intellectually. There is an exploiting of different ideas, different views of parties in a country and change it to an intellectual terrorism just for specific and private interests or to take power in a country. Under the name of rights there is a huge deface on religion through deception and mislead people and push them to take unusual habits and acts which leads to anger some people without taking into account of other religion through burning the religious book, abusing religious characters and all these acts consider to be intellectual terrorism and spreading hatred among different religions who were living in peace before without any crucial and serious big problem. To this devastating end, the extremist parties and their elements try to use any way of means to reach their dirty and bad intentions. Even we live in a media revolution nowadays which if anything happens in the farthest part of the world will be known in other parts in a way or another, make them to have hostile ideas against who are not in their religion, ethnic, nationality or language, even some of high officials and ranks clearly mention in front of their assembly and spread hostile idea. It has nothing to do with the freedom of expression. It is some kind of terrorism, not physical but intellectual and it is stupidity of people through their bad planned ideas, their political orientation and their trade in the blood of others. Unfortunately there are still many who believe in such things and terrorism and terror belongs to specific religion or ideology without having a minimum information on it. We all together need to face intellectual terrorism and stop them otherwise the situation goes worse than it is.