In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes voices concern over the squandering of the prospects of human prosperity. This paper argues that the remedy he proposes is the political replication of scripture's idea of ...creation; the acknowledgment of an originator, a first cause of indisputable order. Hobbes's nemesis, the Fool, is an agent of scripture's antithetical tohu and bohu (the disarray that preceded creation), who misguidedly believes he can work disarray to his advantage. For Hobbes this is folly, because the volatility of disarray is beyond human mastery. Nevertheless, steadfastness and prosperity remain at hand, by replicating the order of a 'higher power' that is fortunately echoed in all creation. This paper is made in the image of Hobbes's 'replication methodology', that in turn is modelled after scripture's original depiction of the act of creation "in his own image" (Genesis 1:27). The paper identifies the biblical Nabal as the 'original Fool', and reflects on how the original resonates in Hobbes's iteration.
Prosperity is one of the five critical areas for Sustainable Development according to the 2030 Agenda. This research develops a prosperity model for a tourism destination and examines stakeholders’ ...perception of the role of sustainable tourism development in enhancing the prosperity. A set of 18 sustainability indicators were used and identified through a hybrid model that combines results from a systematic literature search and four-stage convergent interviews. Results from 171 participants from five different groups of stakeholders revealed that sustainable tourism development enhances the prosperity of the target destination in general. Sustainability was found to be a medium to strong predictor of key prosperity dimensions, particularly environmental quality and sociocultural empowerment. Finally, the level of relationships were quantified to assist destination managers in identifying where to expend effort and resources to improve the implementation of sustainable tourism while considering the key dimensions of prosperity.
The prosperity policies and strategies of major economies have the potential to significantly influence both the global economy and the prosperity of other nations. Therefore, the assessment of the ...prosperity performance of major economies holds paramount importance. In this context, the primary aim of this research is to evaluate the prosperity performance of G7 countries using the LOPCOW-based CRADIS method, leveraging sub-component values from the Legatum Prosperity Index. The secondary objective is to examine the relationship between a country's prosperity performance assessed through the LOPCOW-based CRADIS method and its quantifiability within the Legatum Prosperity Index (LPI) framework, as well as its associations with other Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) methodologies. The findings reveal the ranking of countries' prosperity performance as follows: Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, the United States, France, and Italy. Additionally, an assessment of the average prosperity performance of these countries highlights that the United States, France, and Italy perform below the established average. Consequently, it is imperative for these nations to enhance their prosperity performance to make a more substantial contribution to the global economy. Furthermore, sensitivity and discrimination analysis suggest that countries' prosperity performance can be quantified within the LPI framework. Another noteworthy observation is the strong resemblance of the LOPCOW-based CRADIS method to the MEREC-based CRADIS and the LOPCOW-based MARCOS methods
The concept of Fitrah is the central element of the anthropological thought of many thinkers of Islamic sciences. The meanings adopted from this concept, however, contrary to its word, are numerous ...and have caused differences in the explanation and results of it in other fields of humanities. Among the thinkers, Martyr Motahari considered Fitrah to be the "Umm al−Ma'arif" of the Quran and Islamic thought and made it the center of his thought. Therefore, dealing with education in the thought of Martyr Motahari is limited to dealing with the theory of Fitrah in his view. This research was conducted to analyze the meaning of education based on Shahid Motahari's view of the theory of Fitrah. For this purpose, the content analysis method was used and all his written works were examined. The results obtained from the stages of data collection have been classified and analyzed by the content analysis method. The results of this research show that two meanings of Fitrah can be inferred from his thought, one is Fitrah as the way of human creation and the other as the human dimension of man. Each of these interpretations of Fitrah causes various educational implications. As a result, the meaning of education in his thought can be found in the explanation of different themes such as amendment, prosperity, guidance, evolution, and growth.
The prosperity message preached mainly by independent apostles and prophets in Network Christianity’s new prophetic churches with some Pentecostal leanings has become popular among many Africans. The ...link between the American prosperity message and its African nephew is discussed to disclose the unique African elements, such as Africa’s traditional emphasis on a holistic spirituality which includes attaining health and prosperity by pacifying evil spirits and angry ancestors. One of the reasons for the popularity of the prosperity message is that it links closely with the African enchanted worldview and the spirituality that characterizes African traditional religion. This challenges Pentecostals to consider its compatibility with the gospel of Jesus Christ, based on the discipleship of the cross and servanthood, and suggests that the neo-Pentecostal prophet and apostle have become the modern equivalent of Africa’s diviner and healer. Their message of prosperity deviates from the essence of the gospel of Christ in several respects: firstly, it entails a distorted view of God and the Bible, described in almost pantheistic terms; secondly, its anthropology and Christology view relegates Christ to a man empowered by the Spirit and elevates human beings’ union with God; lastly, its view of revelation authorizes extrabiblical revelation to the same extent as the biblical text. This paper concludes that the prosperity message represents a dangerous fallacy based on a syncretistic contextualization of the gospel to African spirituality.
Data mining (DM) includes techniques for finding meaningful information hidden in these massive data stacks. The aim of this study is to divide the countries into groups according to their prosperity ...levels with Cluster Analysis (CA), which is one of the DM techniques, and to show the applicability of the method. In this context, the 2019 data of 167 countries within the 12 prosperity indicators in The Legatum Prosperity Index (LPI) were used. In the study, countries were divided into groups with the Ward’s algorithm and the similarities between the countries were determined with the K-Means and Turkey's place in the groups was determined. The results show that countries are divided into three clusters according to their prosperity levels. The most effective indicators in dividing them into clusters are "market access and infrastructure, education, investment environment", and the least effective indicators are "social capital, natural environment, safety and security". It has been determined that Turkey is located in the middle prosperity level cluster and its "health, living conditions, education" indicators are the highest, while its "natural environment, personal freedom, management" indicators are the lowest.
Although most countries of the world seek to improve their performance to achieve prosperity for their citizens, the performance of some other countries is still disappointing and has witnessed a ...deterioration in recent years due to civil wars, poverty, and failure to identify shortcomings and work on them. Many global indexes are concerned with ranking and evaluating the performance of countries, the most prominent of which is the Legatum prosperity index. This study presents a novel tool based on the MCDM approach under uncertainty. Twelve pillars were considered as criteria for evaluating the performance of the 19 poorest-performing countries globally, according to the 2021 Legatum prosperity index. The rough-entropy and rough-TOPSIS methods were used to assess the performance of countries and analyze the pillars of prosperity to determine their shortcomings. Further, a comparison with the 2021 Legatum prosperity index and sensitivity analysis is conducted to validate the obtained results. This study analyses and identifies that South Sudan gets the worst ranking while Cameroon is the best. Likewise, the results indicate that the worst performance pillar was the governance pillar, while the best pillar was the health pillar at the level of the studied countries. The proposed approach is essential for researchers working on performance measurement and ranking, as it ensures the robustness and realism of the results. It also gives a glimpse to the leaders of the countries about the actual situation of their countries to work on addressing the failures. In addition, it makes a significant contribution to the current scientific knowledge by providing a novel tool for evaluating performance indexes.
