The proof is in, folks. Read all about it:
From the recent Scientific American | Mind Matters article by Andrew Newberg, Religious Experiences Shrink Part of the Brain:
The article, “Religious factors and hippocampal atrophy in late life,” by Amy Owen and colleagues at Duke University represents an important advance in our growing understanding of the relationship between the brain and religion. The study, published March 30 in PLoS One, showed greater atrophy in the hippocampus in individuals who identify with specific religious groups…
Read the rest of the article HERE.
Later… 😉
~Eric
Nocturnal Slacker v2.0 
Ha, I knew it. My conclusions were correct after all. 🙂
Ah… Doctor Comhack, I presume? 😉
But of course. 🙂
Must have been an athiest doing that research.
Dunno… but it was an atheist who posted it here on this blog. 😉
Well atleast I am not the only outcast here hehehe
Actually, it wasn’t an atheist. Far from it. The research was done by an outfit named the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health. That group was funded, in turn, by the Templeton Foundation, which is a religionist organization whose main goal is to hammer the square peg of religion into the round hole of science, without regard to the fact that the two won’t fit.
You can find out more about Templeton’s game here, if you like. Of note is that they had, for many years, funded several studies on the supposed power of prayer. Of note is the fact that the most comprehensive of them, whose results they released in 2006 (cached in case you can’t view it online), were so disappointing that they abandoned all their other prayer studies and have basically given up on that whole gimmick.
No, this was not a case of those vile, wicked non-believers purposely cooking up a study that discredits religion and makes it look bad. Quite the opposite, this is a case of believers who cooked up a study they assumed would present religion in a good light, but being faced with a different conclusion. I credit them for publishing the results, but that’s about the best that can be said of this (or any of Templeton’s other games).