Summary: | Numerous authors agree on the existence of a positive correlation between spiritual experiences and religious beliefs. The strength of this relationship, however, is amplified by the method of construction of scales measuring spirituality. Items in these scales typically consist of both descriptions of spiritual experiences, and accounts of those experiences as originating by way of the supernatural. In this article, we have created instruments measuring spirituality without including interpretations of spiritual experiences, as well as modifying two most commonly used scales, Piedmont’s Spiritual Transcendence Scale and Cloninger’s Self-Transcendence Scale, so that they also consisted exclusively of descriptions of spiritual experiences with no interpretations added. None of such conceived measures correlate with the two different measures of religiousness in our study - neither with religious beliefs, nor with religious practice.
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