Hasil untuk "Philosophy of religion. Psychology of religion. Religion in relation to other subjects"

Bilge Taskin, Teddy Lazebnik

Religions are among the most consequential social institutions, shaping collective identities, moral norms, and political organization across societies and historical periods. Nevertheless, despite extensive scholarship describing conversion, competition, and secularization, there is still no widely adopted formal model that captures religious dynamics over time within a unified, mechanistic framework. In this study, we propose an epidemiologically grounded model of religious change in which religions spread and compete analogously to co-circulating strains. The model extends multi-strain compartmental dynamics by distinguishing passive believers, active missionaries, and religious elites, and by incorporating demographic turnover and mutation-like splitting that endogenously generates new denominations. Using computer simulations, we show that the same mechanism reproduces canonical qualitative regimes, including emergence from rarity, rapid expansion, long-run coexistence, and transient rise-and-fall movements. A reduced calibration variant fits historical affiliation trajectories with parsimonious regime shifts in effective recruitment and disaffiliation, yielding interpretable signatures of changing social conditions. Finally, sensitivity analyses map sharp regime boundaries in parameter space, indicating that modest shifts in recruitment efficacy or retention among active spreaders can qualitatively alter long-run religious landscapes. These results establish a general, interpretable framework for studying religion as a dynamical diffusion process and provide a tool for comparative inference and counterfactual analysis in sociological research.

Yaser Hashemi, Ahmad Valiee, Mohammad Javad Asghari

Atheists have long advanced arguments against the existence of God, challenging the claims of theists. Among these, John L. Schellenberg has proposed an argument known as “divine hiddenness,” which has garnered significant attention from philosophers of religion. Therefore, the subject of this paper is to critique and examine this argument based on the ontological foundations of Avicenna, one of the greatest theist philosophers and prominent figures in Islamic philosophy. The methodology of this article is descriptive-analytical, based on an ontological examination of the rational possibility of connection and the occurrence of connection with the transcendent through religious and mystical experiences. Through a careful examination, it will be demonstrated that Avicenna’s ontological foundations not only support the possibility of relational experiences with the divine but also, when considered within the framework of logical argumentation and the epistemological certainty of mutawātirāt (mass-transmitted hadith), establish the reliability and certainty of such transcendent relations. Consequently, the argument from divine hiddenness—and by extension, atheism—is effectively refuted.

Mahmad bin Muhammad Rafiʿ

تروم هذه الدراسة وصف وتحليل إشكال ثنائيّة العمل السياسي والعمل الدعوي في فكر أبو سليمان؛ من أجل معرفة ما قدمه من تفاصيل نظرية وعملية لهذه الثنائية، وقد تضمنت هذه الدراسة بيان الأصول والمفاهيم التي يتأسس عليها النسق المعرفي الناظم لفكر أبو سليمان، ومنه مفهوم العمل السياسي والدعوي، كما تضمنت الدراسة الأصول النظرية التي بنى عليها أبو سليمان مقاربته لهذه الثنائية: من تأصيل وتأريخ؛ لمعرفة ما طرأ عليها من تحولات، والصورة التي آلت إليها في السياق المعاصر، ثم ختمت الدراسة باستعراض تحليلي للحلول الإجرائية التي قدمها أبو سليمان في حل معضلة العلاقة بين العمل السياسي والدعوي، يمكن إجماله في الفصل الوظيفي الدستوري بين العملين؛ على قاعدة التكامل والاستقلال؛ من أجل سد ذريعة احتكار السلطة السياسية للمؤسّسات الدعوية والتربوية وغيرها.

Kazi Abrab Hossain, Jannatul Somiya Mahmud, Maria Hossain Tuli et al.

While recent developments in large language models have improved bias detection and classification, sensitive subjects like religion still present challenges because even minor errors can result in severe misunderstandings. In particular, multilingual models often misrepresent religions and have difficulties being accurate in religious contexts. To address this, we introduce BRAND: Bilingual Religious Accountable Norm Dataset, which focuses on the four main religions of South Asia: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam, containing over 2,400 entries, and we used three different types of prompts in both English and Bengali. Our results indicate that models perform better in English than in Bengali and consistently display bias toward Islam, even when answering religion-neutral questions. These findings highlight persistent bias in multilingual models when similar questions are asked in different languages. We further connect our findings to the broader issues in HCI regarding religion and spirituality.

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.

Nina Lutz, Benjamin Olsen, Weishung Liu et al.

Previous work has found a lack of research in HCI on religion, partly driven by misunderstandings of values and practices between religious and technical communities. To bridge this divide in an empirically rigorous way, we conducted an interview study with 48 religious people and/or experts from 11 faiths, and we document how religious people experience, understand, and imagine technologies. We show that religious stakeholders find non-neutral secular embeddings in technologies and the firms and people that design them, and how these manifest in unintended harms for religious and nonreligious users. Our findings reveal how users navigate technoreligious practices with religiously informed mental models and what they desire from technologies. Informed by this, we distill six design values -- wonder, humility, space, embodiedness, community, and eternity -- to guide technologists in considering and leveraging religion as an additional, valid sociocultural resource when designing for a holistic user. We further spell out directions for future research.

James Arthur

Is character education a legitimate goal of higher education? Character education should aim to form people so they can live well in a world worth living in. All universities, whether faith-inspired or not, have an obligation to prepare students for life—a life worth living, a life with purpose. The Christian faith conviction that we as humans have a common telos, that there is an ultimate common good, or highest good, that is God, is central to any Catholic concept of character and flourishing in the university. The practice of the virtues, through good character, is the road to this spiritual end. Catholic Universities traditionally have many features that make them well-placed to cultivate the virtues of character in their students, particularly through the lens of a Christian anthropology. The work of the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues on universities is highlighted together with recent scholarly discussion of the place of character virtues in secular and Christian universities.

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.

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.

عماد الدين خليل

تضمن هذا العدد عدداً من البحوث ذات الصلة بموضوع "السُّنن الإلهية". وقد خُصّصت كلمة التحرير للحديث عن " فقه السُّنن". وانتُظم العدد في ستة أبحاث؛ إذ جاء البحث الأول بعنوان "حالة البحوث في السُّنَن الإلهية في بناء الأُمم والحضارات" للدكتورة علياء العظم. والبحث الثاني بعنوان "سنن قيام الأمم" للدكتور فتحي حسن ملكاوي. والبحث الثالث بعنوان " فقه السُّنَن الإلهية والثقافة السُّنَنيّة " للدكتور عزمي طه السّيد. والبحث الرابع بعنوان "الإنسان السُّنَني بين التفكير الحداثي وقِيَم الاستخلاف والعمران للدكتور عمار قاسمي. والبحث الخامس بعنوان "خصائص السُّنَن الإلهية وأبعادها العلمية والحضارية " للدكتور راشد سعيد شهوان. والبحث السادس بعنوان "موقع التفكير السُّنَني في حركة الإصلاح الفكري المعاصر" للدكتور رشيد كهوس.      واحتوى العدد باب "قراءات ومراجعات"؛ إذ تضمن استقراء ومراجعة لما نُشر في مجلة "الفكر الإسلامي المعاصر" حول موضوع السنن من العدد 1 حتى العدد 104 بعنوان "السّنن الإلهية في أبحاث مجلّة الفكر الإسلامي المعاصر" وقدّمها الدكتور عبد الله عمر. وفي العدد منتقيات حديثة لبعض المؤلفات المتصلة بأبحاث العدد ضمن باب "عروض مختصرة" أعدها  إيصال صالح الحوامدة.

Joesana Tjahjani, Sonya Sondakh

Bukit Kasih Kanonang (Kanonang Love Hill) is a place of worship for Christians of the Minahasa Regency, North Sulawesi, one of the provinces of Indonesia, which in its development has also become a popular tourist destination. As a site that blends Christian elements, local traditional elements and values of tolerance among the world’s major religions namely Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism, this beautiful piece of land includes a number of sites such as a monument to tolerance, a house of worship for each religion, a giant crucifix, statues, and the faces of Minahasan ancestors carved into cliff faces. All these elements suggest that while the people have values of tolerance and religious harmony, nonetheless the 55-meter giant white cross at Bukit Kasih Kanonang is evidence of the dominance of the local people’s Protestant Christian belief. Using the perspective of Hayden’s Antagonistic Tolerance, this paper investigates how people of other religions deal with the issue of dominance and how the social construct in the saying Torang Samua Basudara (we are all family), which has been the way of life of the Minahasan people, supports the concepts of tolerance and harmony.

Stefania Cerutti

Book Review of Contemporary Christian Travel, Pilgrimage, Practice and Place, by Amos S. Ron and Dallen J. Timothy.

Olanrewaju Tahir Aduragba, Alexandra I. Cristea, Pete Phillips et al.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Church closed its physical doors for the first time in about 800 years, which is, arguably, a cataclysmic event. Other religions have found themselves in a similar situation, and they were practically forced to move online, which is an unprecedented occasion. In this paper, we analyse this sudden change in religious activities twofold: we create and deliver a questionnaire, as well as analyse Twitter data, to understand people's perceptions and activities related to religious activities online. Importantly, we also analyse the temporal variations in this process by analysing a period of 3 months: July-September 2020. Additionally to the separate analysis of the two data sources, we also discuss the implications from triangulating the results.

Jonathan Jong

The psychological study of religion has its roots first in the natural histories of religion of the Enlightenment and then in the comparative and evolutionary researches of the Victorian anthropologists. From its earliest days, its focus has always been on individuals and their beliefs, behaviors, and experiences, and how these relate to other aspects of their lives. As older natural histories or genealogies of religion did, psychological and neuroscientific approaches to religion still raise questions of religious epistemology.

Wisnu Pudji Pawestri, Siti Kholifah

The diversity of religious practices forms a new pattern, where each community is challenged to be 'in tune' with the current trend and situation. The pattern challenges each community to compete with others to provide good bargaining power so the audience is in the discourse that they produced. To propagate hijrah discourse, Taubah Muslim (Community’s name is disguised) community uses fashion as a strategy in da’wah activism. Taubah Muslim hijrah community is a community that persuades millennials to hijrah through da'wah. Fashion in this context is positioned as a medium as well as a 'new way' to approach the da'wah target. This article puts fashion as a social practice in which there are forms of representation and expression of Islamic values. Using a descriptive qualitative method, this article highlights how fashion is used and chosen by agents in da’wah arena as a strategy to reproduce hijrah discourse. Based on Pierre Bourdieu's social practice theory, the results of the analysis conclude that fashion is used as a placement strategy to encourage perceptions of shared identity. Furthermore, fashion functionally is used as an acculturation technique to approach the da'wah target (young generation). The choice of fashion as a da'wah strategy is based on habitus and capital owned by agents in the da'wah arena. Then, Fashion is treated as a representation of other meanings that are presented by agents to create reality, which is based on their habitus and capital. The existence of capital becomes an important thing for the community to maintain, strengthen, and differentiate (distinction) with others in achieving a dominant position, namely in terms of propagative hijrah discourse

Yves Gingras, Kristoff Talin

This research presents the results of a comparative analysis of the links between religious practices and beliefs and levels of scientific knowledge. Based on secondary analyses of survey data in the European Union (Eurobarometers 2005 and 2010) and the United States (Pew Research Center 2018), we show that, regardless of the country, correlations suggest that the more individuals identify with a religion and the more intensely they practice that religion, the less scientifically literate they are, as measured in standard tests. Moreover, scientific representations are also related to individual religious outlook. The more individuals adhere to a religion, the less they have positive attitudes towards science. The conclusion suggests possible interpretations of theses correlations.

Rochana Chaturvedi, Sugat Chaturvedi

Demographic inference from text has received a surge of attention in the field of natural language processing in the last decade. In this paper, we use personal names to infer religion in South Asia - where religion is a salient social division, and yet, disaggregated data on it remains scarce. Existing work predicts religion using dictionary based method, and therefore, can not classify unseen names. We use character based models which learn character patterns and, therefore, can classify unseen names as well with high accuracy. These models are also much faster and can easily be scaled to large data sets. We improve our classifier by combining the name of an individual with that of their parent/spouse and achieve remarkably high accuracy. Finally, we trace the classification decisions of a convolutional neural network model using layer-wise relevance propagation which can explain the predictions of complex non-linear classifiers and circumvent their purported black box nature. We show how character patterns learned by the classifier are rooted in the linguistic origins of names.

Norman Fenton

There has been great concern in the UK that people from the BAME (Black And Minority Ethnic) community have a far higher risk of dying from Covid19 than those of other ethnicities. However, the overall fatalities data from the Government's ONS (Office of National Statistics) most recent report on deaths by religion shows that Jews (very few of whom are classified as BAME) have a much higher risk than those of religions (Hindu, Sikh, Muslim) with predominantly BAME people. This apparently contradictory result is, according to the ONS statistical analysis, implicitly explained by age as the report claims that, when 'adjusted for age' Muslims have the highest fatality risk. However, the report fails to provide the raw data to support this. There are many factors other than just age that must be incorporated into any analysis of the observed data before making definitive conclusions about risk based on religion/ethnicity. We propose the need for a causal model for this. If we discount unknown genetic factors, then religion and ethnicity have NO impact at all on a person's Covid19 death risk once we know their age, underlying medical conditions, work/living conditions, and extent of social distancing.

Manuel Revuelta González

On the 75th birthday of Miscelánea Comillas, this article discusses three of its historical landmarks. Firstly, we remember its origins, in 1943, when the university celebrated its 50th anniversary. As part of the celebrations, the university published a book that included academic articles written by students and faculty. Two years later, this book evolved into a periodical publication offering multi-disciplinary contents. Secondly, the journal is described as a historical mirror of the different faculties connected to it. The last part of the paper analyzes the journal in its role of promoting faculty research, by publishing their articles and reviews, and advertising their scholarly publications.