Some people are religious. They go to the church. There people are not religious. They don’t go to church.
Obviously it’s not that simple. I felt that measuring religiosity is difficult as I was reading. As a research of official religions the book states some characteristics of religiosity, but I was more interested in individual religiosity. “the actual religion of the individual member may not correspond very closely to the official model”(104). What individual believe is from from who and what one was taught and what one choose to believe. For example people start to disagree on some moral issues such as birth control and homosexual behavior. Whatever one’s religion says, people should decide what to do. People can be religious without obeying teaching or going church every week.
I think believing religion is already individual decision, so one should decide what to believe according to what one needs and doesn’t need. In my opinion religion is something that people choose to believe in order to make their life easier, to find meaning in their life. But then at same time it sounds weird to me that you can be religious without obeying its own religion. If “religious” people are picking up what they want to believe, am I religious since I do pick up some ideas to believe and not from different religion?(well I don’t consider myself as religious anyway)