How Religious Are Lithuanian People?

Well, to give myself some credit I can tell you that I did sociology in university, and my main interest was religious sociology. My bachelors thesis was on Religiosity in post-soviet Lithuania. So there we go.

Firstly Id like to say that religiosity is a thing we cannot really measure. If we are to look at the statistical data from the census (last one was in 2011) we can see, that slightly more than 77% of the people considers themselves as Catholics. In 2001 the number was 79%, thus, the difference is minuscule.

This is just the Catholics, there are also Orthodox and Evangelical Christians, as well as a huge array of other Christian denominations, some Islam followers, Buddhists etc. According to this data - yes, Lithuanians are indeed pretty religious.Yet, I believe, that most of the people in Lithuania are nominally religious.

By this I mean the faade religiosity: they dont go to the church that often, are not scrupulous about the Decalogue, probably have not read the Bible in the last 10 years. They just say that they are Catholic. Being a Catholic does not automatically mean one is religious in the deep sense.

However, Christian holidays are still vigorously observed and held important. Then again: who are we to decide who is TRULY religious and who is not; we cannot reliably measure this. So the safest way is to say that Lithuanians are reasonably religious.

Most of the young people feel indifferent towards religion, as far as I have noticed. Independence and liberalising attitudes have brough secularism to Lithuania and now, people born in the late 80s and later barely ever had the need for religion. Most of the needs that may be called religious can be satisfied by other means.

Nonetheless, people who were born in the USSR, hold religiosity dear, as it was one of the ways to protest the oppressive and atheist regime as well as maintain national identity. It became sort of a habit.So there are basically two factions: 35 who are more or less religious and the secular youth.

As we know, people tend to grow more religious over the years, so this may not be surprising, yet the reasons behind this divide in Lithuania are somewhat different than in the West

· Related Questions

What are some characteristics of Lithuanian people?

Every nation has its national character, and Lithuanians are not an exception. There were some good points mentioned in the other answers already, yet I must agree that stereotypes also play a big role here.

Everything is changing rapidly, and there are probably some key points that should be taken into consideration when talking about any nation as a whole. In my opinion, there are at least 2, those are history and u2013 no kidding u2013 weather. Iu2019ll start with history u2013 I think there are almost 3 generations that describe todayu2019s Lithuania, and they are all crazy different.

Thatu2019s why itu2019s also misleading to say that Lithuanians are very conservative and private as a group. There are still a lot of people who spent their childhood and whole adult lives in Soviet Union, and it hasnu2019t been that long since theyu2019re free. Of course, 50 years of various restrictions, prohibitions, and attempts to turn them into someone theyu2019re not have shaped the whole country, and you can still feel that vibe in some specific situations or institutions.

Then thereu2019s those who were growing up in an independent country already, have seen it transitioning, and are enjoying every opportunity they have. The third group, the youngest one, born after the 2000's u2013 difficult to tame in a good way : ) Try to mix all of those together and you might get what todayu2019s Lithuanians are all about.About the weather u2013 my coworker has recently made a good point, comparing Lithuanians (or we can probably say Nordic people in general) with the southerners.

Lithuanian winters have always been cold, and thereu2019s definitely been some kind of routine every year to prepare for whatu2019s coming. You had to plan a lot and work hard to survive it, and itu2019s been like this for ages. Thatu2019s probably where all those descriptions like u201creservedu201d and u201chard-workingu201d come from.

In the South, you can grow stuff all year round, and this allows people to be more chill, enjoy their days, and donu2019t look into the future that much. However, winters are getting warmer and we donu2019t rely on growing food ourselves that much, so that influences future generations, too.What I meant by all this u2013 yeah, you can describe Lithuanians as reserved, slightly colder, rational, and introverted, and it wouldnu2019t really be a lie, however, as with every other country in the world, it is never 100% accurate as soon as you talk to someone in person.

I know a lot of people that are incredibly chill and even say that they u201cbelong to Spainu201d, yet there are still people who you have to crack open (if you can!) to really see how honest and warm they are. All in all, Lithuanians are the people who are proud of their roots and stand united whenever thereu2019s a chance u2013 whether itu2019s some basketball match, celebrating their national holidays, or supporting others (ever heard of the u201cFreedom wayu201d?

) : )

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What does "Deep" really mean in Deep Learning?

Thats a very common but interesting question.Many people have this notion that adding more layers makes you transition from machine learning to deep learning!

I have also seen people drawing a decision boundary between machine learning and deep learning: neural networks are deep learning and SVMs, regressions are machine learning! While the first notion is partly true, the second claim is ridiculous.Neural networks has been there for a long time now, before Deep Learning became cool.

So just being able to add more layers (thanks to improved hardware resources we have now) makes it deep ?Now lets look at one specific case which shows that how we have actually transitioned from machine learning to deep learning (if at all). There is a crucial task in natural language processing: POS-tagging.

Earlier, to predict the tag, we used to use features like surrounding tags, whether the word is capitalized, whether it is multi-word, what is its first character etc. So, we used to manually handcraft features like these and then, maybe, use some feature selection like chi-square, correlation-based to select the most fit features and finally use some machine learning algorithm to predict the tag for the word.The most significant limitation of this process is that you need to know what feature you should start with and then choosing which features are to be selected from them.

Above all, this process also needs a little-bit domain expertise whereas the most significant role of learning algorithms must be to eliminate DA from the user as much as possible. Deep Learning learns features from data and the features it learns are more rich and meaningful. In other words, deep learning helps you to learn useful representations of your data to better solve the task at hand.

You are dealing with real-valued vectors now that contain all significant information about any word, phrase and sentence now and also it learns which information to use from the data directly. All this happens due to the efficient designs of neural architecture, training objective and also data with rich pattern and sufficient enough for the algorithm.In a way, you can also say thatDeep Learning Machine Learning Representation Learning.

So, basically you see that just increasing layers for the sake of it does not make your algorithm deep. A deep learning model has two important components: efficient features and efficient predictor. Both are learnt!

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What do Koreans dislike about Korean culture and Korean people?

I agree with Choe about most of the things she had written, especially no. 11 and 12.

Many teenagers are extremely stressed because of KSAT. Many teenagers have (1) little sleep and (2) suicidal ideation due to this exam. Also, internet censorship is pretty harsh.

I often see a red warning sign whenever I click this or that site in google, which is hilarious since it is not like I am clicking a site encouraging terrorism or national treason.Now, my answer to the question: the one thing I dislike most, as a Korean, as of the moment, is that the state is enforcing gender equality. The government increasing the number of female police officer is understandable.

The same thing with the female firefighter.BUT WHAT IS UNACCEPTABLE IS THAT THEY ARE EVEN LOWERING THE STANDARD (ex. Physical fitness) FOR THE SAKE OF EQUALITY.

AND WHAT ISSUED WAS A HILARIOUS INCIDENCE IN WHICH A POLICE OFFICER ASKING A CITIZEN TO HELP HER DEAL WITH THE DRUNK MAN.This is the image showing how the standard of the female police officer is different from man:As you can see, the officer below has her knees on the floor. However, a male police officer is not allowed to do so.

Here is the link to the article and video depicting the officer telling a random citizen to come out and help her out:", " , I know this is just one officer and that she does not surely represent the entire female police officer. However, I dont think the lowering of the standard for physical fitness does not have anything to do with that. I am the sort of person who does not give a shxx about a persons gender as long as he or she gets his or her job done right (you see, I use he or she coz I learned that using he as a word including women is androcentric.

) Be it a man or woman, I want any officer who cannot get his or her work done right out. And the government is letting in an inefficient police officer. Why do I have to give a penny of what I earn for the sake of these police officers whose ability is in doubt?

The government calls it equality. Well, is it? I dont think so