Hasil untuk "Practical religion. The Christian life"

Nicholas Skytland, Lauren Parsons, Alicia Llewellyn et al.

Artificial intelligence (AI) alignment is fundamentally a formation problem, not only a safety problem. As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly mediate moral deliberation and spiritual inquiry, they do more than provide information; they function as instruments of digital catechesis, actively shaping and ordering human understanding, decision-making, and moral reflection. To make this formative influence visible and measurable, we introduce the Flourishing AI Benchmark: Christian Single-Turn (FAI-C-ST), a framework designed to evaluate Frontier Model responses against a Christian understanding of human flourishing across seven dimensions. By comparing 20 Frontier Models against both pluralistic and Christian-specific criteria, we show that current AI systems are not worldview-neutral. Instead, they default to a Procedural Secularism that lacks the grounding necessary to sustain theological coherence, resulting in a systematic performance decline of approximately 17 points across all dimensions of flourishing. Most critically, there is a 31-point decline in the Faith and Spirituality dimension. These findings suggest that the performance gap in values alignment is not a technical limitation, but arises from training objectives that prioritize broad acceptability and safety over deep, internally coherent moral or theological reasoning.

Rebecca M. M. Hicke, Brian W. Haggard, Mia Ferrante et al.

In addition to its more widely studied cultural movements, American Evangelicalism has a well-developed but less externally visible literary side. Christian Fiction, however, has been little studied, and what scholarly attention there is has focused on the explosively popular Left Behind series. In this work, we use computational tools to provide both a broad topical overview of Christian Fiction as a genre and a more directed exploration of how its authors depict divine acts. Working with human annotators, we first developed a codebook for identifying "acts of God." We then adapted the codebook for use by a recent, lightweight LM with the assistance of a much larger model. The laptop-scale LM is largely capable of matching human annotations, even when the task is subtle and challenging. Using these annotations, we show that significant and meaningful differences exist between divine acts depicted by the Left Behind books and Christian Fiction more broadly.

Marc Bara

The promise of "free and open" multi-terabyte datasets often collides with harsh realities. While these datasets may be technically accessible, practical barriers -- from processing complexity to hidden costs -- create a system that primarily serves well-funded institutions. This study examines accessibility challenges across web crawls, satellite imagery, scientific data, and collaborative projects, revealing a consistent two-tier system where theoretical openness masks practical exclusivity. Our analysis demonstrates that datasets marketed as "publicly accessible" typically require minimum investments of \$1,000+ for meaningful analysis, with complex processing pipelines demanding \$10,000-100,000+ in infrastructure costs. The infrastructure requirements -- distributed computing knowledge, domain expertise, and substantial budgets -- effectively gatekeep these datasets despite their "open" status, limiting practical accessibility to those with institutional support or substantial resources.

Katharina Simbeck, Mariam Mahran

Despite growing research on bias in large language models (LLMs), most work has focused on gender and race, with little attention to religious identity. This paper explores how religion is internally represented in LLMs and how it intersects with concepts of violence and geography. Using mechanistic interpretability and Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) via the Neuronpedia API, we analyze latent feature activations across five models. We measure overlap between religion- and violence-related prompts and probe semantic patterns in activation contexts. While all five religions show comparable internal cohesion, Islam is more frequently linked to features associated with violent language. In contrast, geographic associations largely reflect real-world religious demographics, revealing how models embed both factual distributions and cultural stereotypes. These findings highlight the value of structural analysis in auditing not just outputs but also internal representations that shape model behavior.

Љерка Јефтић

The paper is concerned with the metaphorical meanings of the verbs of perception in Serbian – vidjeti (see) and pogledati (look at) – in Bishop Atanasije’s translation of the Hebrew text of the Book of Genesis and in his comments accompanying specific verses. The analysis is set within the framework of cognitive linguistic theory of conceptual metaphor which treats metaphor as a cognitive mechanism in the construction of meaning in thought and language.The construction or understanding of meaning is achieved by way of mentally accessing an abstract target domain in terms of a concrete source domain whereby the term domain refers to any coherent organization of experience. With this in mind, the paper draws on the interpretation referred to by Bishop Atanasije that, in the course of God’s creating the world, God knew even before he saw (that is, knowledge, as the target domain, preceded sight, as the source domain) that what He created was good, but explicates His knowledge by means of the verb of perception (see) for the sake of humans because, as the paper argues in line with cognitive linguistic findings, visual input is one of the most important sources of human knowledge. Hence, the analysis focuses on the role of the verbs of perception with God as the agent in His relationship with the creation, as well as on the metaphorical and metonymic uniqueness of the biblical narration of God’s creation of the world, as contained in the translation of the Hebrew text into Serbian and Bishop Atanasije’s comments. The results of the analysis indicate that the creation is both in God’s knowledge and His sight, that is, God knows and sees the creation as long as it is good, i.e., as He intended it to be. However, once the creation gets corrupt due to humans disobeying God’s commands thus alienating themselves from God’s knowledge and sight, the new relationship is established wherein the creation becomes the object of God’s attention and regard which He continues to care for.

Francois Venter

Decision-making in the Reformed Churches in South Africa The hypothesis for this article is that no complete certainty can exist on whether a resolution taken by a meeting of people is an authoritative expression of the will of God. The church [ekklésia] of Christ refers to the universal church of all times and places, as well as the local church (congregation). The general nature of collective decision-making involves the notions of representation and voting. The Reformation liberated churches from the overlordship of Rome, but also had the unintended consequence of the entrenchment of the liberal notions of individual sovereignty and self-sufficiency. The foundational Reformed confessional documents were formulated and adopted at gatherings convened and overseen by extra-clerical (state) institutions. It is likely that decision-making in the churches was directly influenced by the rationalism, humanism, and liberalism that has been influential since the 17th century. Contemporary participants in collective decision-making can find it difficult to distinguish between liberal-democratic processes and those of the church. Christ is the only head of his church and exegesis and hermeneutics are not exact sciences, it is, however, possible to deliberate on alternative Scriptural interpretations, but impossible to prove one to be correct and the other false. The inability of a major assembly of churches to resolve an exegetical question unanimously, attests to the human inability to know the will of God completely. Resolutions of major assemblies should be subject to unrestricted revision as the assemblies are not meetings of a church or of the church itself. Influential opinions among Reformed authors hover between independentism and collegialism, both having been influenced by liberal thinking. Contribution: A range of interdependent matters need to be clarified to resolve questions concerning representation in and decision-making by major assemblies. A list of such questions has been set out at the end of the article.

Julio C. Rangel, Tarcisio Mendes de Farias, Ana Claudia Sima et al.

The recent success of Large Language Models (LLM) in a wide range of Natural Language Processing applications opens the path towards novel Question Answering Systems over Knowledge Graphs leveraging LLMs. However, one of the main obstacles preventing their implementation is the scarcity of training data for the task of translating questions into corresponding SPARQL queries, particularly in the case of domain-specific KGs. To overcome this challenge, in this study, we evaluate several strategies for fine-tuning the OpenLlama LLM for question answering over life science knowledge graphs. In particular, we propose an end-to-end data augmentation approach for extending a set of existing queries over a given knowledge graph towards a larger dataset of semantically enriched question-to-SPARQL query pairs, enabling fine-tuning even for datasets where these pairs are scarce. In this context, we also investigate the role of semantic "clues" in the queries, such as meaningful variable names and inline comments. Finally, we evaluate our approach over the real-world Bgee gene expression knowledge graph and we show that semantic clues can improve model performance by up to 33% compared to a baseline with random variable names and no comments included.

David Reissmann

Dariusz Oko

Adam Zadroga

The role of Catholic social teaching has been attributed to the promotion of moral values and principles that should be considered when establishing or evaluating a given social, economic, or political system. This also applies to smaller structures, specific institutions, concepts, and practical social solutions, which may include social entrepreneurship. The article aims to confirm the hypothesis that, taking into account the principles of Catholic social teaching in the process of discovering the axionormative determinants of social entrepreneurship allows its deeper understanding and more effective implementation of its praxeological goals. At the beginning of the paper, the author emphasises the common source of all general and specific axionormative criteria of the two analysed disciplines – the dignity of a human person. Further deliberations revolve around other values and principles, such as the value of human work and entrepreneurship, the common good, the universal destination of goods, the preferential option for the poor, solidarity, subsidiarity, and participation.

W. Wessels

Stand-Up Preaching, as per the subject line, promises homiletic insights from contemporary comedians. I must admit that Myers engages with contemporary comedians and the theory of comedy, as far as I can discern, in the most thorough manner possible in a single book. The list of comedians he contemplates is exceptionally comprehensive, and it seems that every well-known comedian who has set foot on American soil has at least been mentioned. I found myself, throughout the book, researching the comedians he introduced for further context on these personalities and backgrounds. In that respect, this is a brilliantly researched work by Myers.

Mark Kiermayer, Christian Weiß

Markov chains play a key role in a vast number of areas, including life insurance mathematics. Standard actuarial quantities as the premium value can be interpreted as compressed, lossy information about the underlying Markov process. We introduce a method to reconstruct the underlying Markov chain given collective information of a portfolio of contracts. Our neural architecture explainably characterizes the process by explicitly providing one-step transition probabilities. Further, we provide an intrinsic, economic model validation to inspect the quality of the information decompression. Lastly, our methodology is successfully tested for a realistic data set of German term life insurance contracts.

Yeskia Yeskia

Segala sesuatu ataupun hal-hal yang berkaitan dengan Yesus akan mendapatkan sorotan lebih dari banyak orang, bahkan seseorang akan mencari-cari kesalahan yang ada dalam diri Yesus sehingga mampu untuk dijatuhkannya. Kehadiran Yesus di dalam dunia adalah untuk menyatakan bahwa kebenaran yang Ia miliki sangat berbeda dengan dunia.

Jamaal Ahmad, Kristian Buchardt, Christian Furrer

We consider computation of market values of bonus payments in multi-state with-profit life insurance. The bonus scheme consists of additional benefits bought according to a dividend strategy that depends on the past realization of financial risk, the current individual insurance risk, the number of additional benefits currently held, and so-called portfolio-wide means describing the shape of the insurance business. We formulate numerical procedures that efficiently combine simulation of financial risk with classic methods for the outstanding insurance risk. Special attention is given to the case where the number of additional benefits bought only depends on the financial risk. Methods and results are illustrated via a numerical example.

Pavel Dmitrievich Lenkov

This article tries to answer the question, whether the concept of «social ministry» is applicable in the case of Buddhism. The article analyzes some examples of the consideration of «gift/giving» and «social ministry» in the Buddhist canonical and post-canonical texts, and draws a comparison of the ideas of social ministry in Buddhism and Christianity is made. Since the basic doctrinal points of Buddhism radically different from the Christian, the Christian concept of social ministry and comparable Buddhist concepts differ considerably. Thus, the social ministry in Buddhism is not understood as a service to God. However, the social service in the sense of charity and works of mercy has always been present in Buddhism. Conceptually, the Buddhist «social ministry» can be seen as a doctrine of gift/giving and the ministry of an exemplary Buddhist ruler. These concepts are considered on the basis of Buddhist canonical and post-canonical texts, namely the sutta «Lion’s roar of the world-holder» from the Pali Canon and Vasubandhu’s treatise «Encyclopedia of the Abhidharma» («Abhidharmakosha», 4–5th centuries). The Mahayana ideal of the Bodhisattva and the concept of great compassion (mahakaruna) also had a significant impact on charity and mercy in the countries of the spread of Buddhism. Between Buddhism and Christianity, if we consider them in the aspect of social ministry and charity, there are also similarities. First and foremost is the idea of compassion and mercy towards those who suffer. Both the Christian and Buddhist texts say about the value of such actions and the reward for them.

Peter D. Turney

We present a computational simulation of evolving entities that includes symbiosis with shifting levels of selection. Evolution by natural selection shifts from the level of the original entities to the level of the new symbiotic entity. In the simulation, the fitness of an entity is measured by a series of one-on-one competitions in the Immigration Game, a two-player variation of Conway's Game of Life. Mutation, reproduction, and symbiosis are implemented as operations that are external to the Immigration Game. Because these operations are external to the game, we are able to freely manipulate the operations and observe the effects of the manipulations. The simulation is composed of four layers, each layer building on the previous layer. The first layer implements a simple form of asexual reproduction, the second layer introduces a more sophisticated form of asexual reproduction, the third layer adds sexual reproduction, and the fourth layer adds symbiosis. The experiments show that a small amount of symbiosis, added to the other layers, significantly increases the fitness of the population. We suggest that the model may provide new insights into symbiosis in biological and cultural evolution.

Preeti Sah, Ernest Fokoué

The main source of various religious teachings is their sacred texts which vary from religion to religion based on different factors like the geographical location or time of the birth of a particular religion. Despite these differences, there could be similarities between the sacred texts based on what lessons it teaches to its followers. This paper attempts to find the similarity using text mining techniques. The corpus consisting of Asian (Tao Te Ching, Buddhism, Yogasutra, Upanishad) and non-Asian (four Bible texts) is used to explore findings of similarity measures like Euclidean, Manhattan, Jaccard and Cosine on raw Document Term Frequency [DTM], normalized DTM which reveals similarity based on word usage. The performance of Supervised learning algorithms like K-Nearest Neighbor [KNN], Support Vector Machine [SVM] and Random Forest is measured based on its accuracy to predict correct scared text for any given chapter in the corpus. The K-means clustering visualizations on Euclidean distances of raw DTM reveals that there exists a pattern of similarity among these sacred texts with Upanishads and Tao Te Ching is the most similar text in the corpus.

Genevieve Gorrell, Mehmet E. Bakir, Mark A. Greenwood et al.

Against a backdrop of tensions related to EU membership, we find levels of online abuse toward UK MPs reach a new high. Race and religion have become pressing topics globally, and in the UK this interacts with "Brexit" and the rise of social media to create a complex social climate in which much can be learned about evolving attitudes. In 8 million tweets by and to UK MPs in the first half of 2019, religious intolerance scandals in the UK's two main political parties attracted significant attention. Furthermore, high profile ethnic minority MPs started conversations on Twitter about race and religion, the responses to which provide a valuable source of insight. We found a significant presence for disturbing racial and religious abuse. We also explore metrics relating to abuse patterns, which may affect its impact. We find "burstiness" of abuse doesn't depend on race or gender, but individual factors may lead to politicians having very different experiences online.

Roland Hodler, Paul Raschky, Anthony Strittmatter

We study the effect of religion and intense religious experiences on terrorism by focusing on one of the five pillars of Islam: Ramadan fasting. For identification, we exploit two facts: First, daily fasting from dawn to sunset during Ramadan is considered mandatory for most Muslims. Second, the Islamic calendar is not synchronized with the solar cycle. We find a robust negative effect of more intense Ramadan fasting on terrorist events within districts and country-years in predominantly Muslim countries. This effect seems to operate partly through decreases in public support for terrorism and the operational capabilities of terrorist groups.

The Fermi-LAT Collaboration

Black holes with masses below approximately $10^{15}$ g are expected to emit gamma rays with energies above a few tens of MeV, which can be detected by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT). Although black holes with these masses cannot be formed as a result of stellar evolution, they may have formed in the early Universe and are therefore called Primordial Black Holes (PBHs). Previous searches for PBHs have focused on either short timescale bursts or the contribution of PBHs to the isotropic gamma-ray emission. We show that, in case of individual PBHs, the Fermi LAT is most sensitive to PBHs with temperatures above approximately 16 GeV and masses $6\times 10^{11}$ g, which it can detect out to a distance of about 0.03 pc. These PBHs have a remaining lifetime of months to years at the start of the Fermi mission. They would appear as potentially moving point sources with gamma-ray emission that becomes spectrally harder and brighter with time until the PBH completely evaporates. In this paper, we develop a new algorithm to detect the proper motion of a gamma-ray point sources, and apply it to 318 unassociated point sources at high galactic latitude in the third Fermi-LAT source catalog (3FGL). None of unassociated point sources with spectra consistent with PBH evaporation show significant proper motion. Using the non-detection of PBH candidates, we derive a 99\% confidence limit on PBH evaporation rate in the vicinity of the Earth $\dotρ_{\rm PBH} < 7.2 \times 10^3\: {\rm {pc}^{-3} {yr}^{-1}}$. This limit is similar to the limits obtained with ground-based gamma-ray observatories.