Most research on religion or spirituality measures how important religion or spirituality is to a person. However, religious beliefs and feelings can be very different among people who say religion is important to them. For some people, faith is based on compassion, forgiveness, and unity of all people. For others, religious faith focuses on fear of punishment and guilt. I could find no established questionnaires to measure these important dimensions of religious faith. In order to explore these dimensions and get some experience measuring them, I made a questionnaire and obtained responses from about 50 people with diverse religious beliefs. This study focuses on the positive aspects of religion. I consider this study to provide useful initial information on an important dimension of religion. This study may tend interesting to anyone who wants to explore these potentially important dimensions of religion.
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He quotes the definition in the “Oxford Companion to Mind” as "a fixed, idiosyncratic belief, unusual in the culture to which the person belongs," and notes that "not all false opinions are delusions." Ward then characterizes a delusion as a "clearly false opinion, especially as a symptom of a mental illness," an "irrational belief" that is "so obviously false that all reasonable people would see it as mistaken." He then says that belief in God is different, since “most great philosophers have believed in God, and they are rational people". He argues that “all that is needed to refute the claim that religious belief is a delusion is one clear example of someone who exhibits a high degree of rational ability, who functions well in the ordinary affairs of life and who can produce a reasonable and coherent defense of their beliefs" and claims that there are many such people, "including some of the most able philosophers and scientists in the world