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When I was in Taiwan, I questioned a large number of people about whether they thought certain tenets of Chinese folk religion were literally true or not. Here are some of the responses:
| TENET | PERCENT EXPRESSING LITERAL BELIEF |
| The Fetus Spirit can cause miscarriages and birth defects | |
| Some illnesses are due to malevolent spirts | |
| A funeral must be held on an auspicious day; otherwise bad consequences will result | |
| The geomancy of the grave influences the fortunes of the descendants | |
| There exist such things as ghosts | |
| Merit ceremonies at funerals actually improve the next existence of the dead |
In light of the above results, answer one of the following questions:
A. How do you account for the differing credibility of these various tenets of folk religious doctrine?
B. What do these results, combined with the fact that almost everyone in that village at that time participated in all the ritual activities implied by these tenets, tell you about methods for studying religion? In particular, do they suggest that a psychological or a sociological approach is more enlightening, or that the two approaches should be combined? If they should be combined, then what is the best way to combine them to understand these phenomena?