Take some heart in the following critique
ronjanec. I’m an atheist, but I won’t support bad science to justify my lack of religious belief.
This thread has been placed in Behavioural Science, so I suppose one is allowed to comment on the ‘science’. The video showed a bloke just 'rabbiting on'. The only ‘science’ in his presentation was a 3-second flash of an article in the background that was titled ‘Religious Factors and Hippocampal Atrophy in Late Life’.
It can be found on this site and the full text is available free
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/articl ... ne.0017006 I’m always a bit sceptical when I find claims for anything being the cause of anything else. It’s virtually a prime indicator that science may have gone out the window. Nevertheless, a part of the abstract of this states
“ ... Significantly greater hippocampal atrophy was observed for participants reporting a life-changing religious experience. Significantly greater hippocampal atrophy was also observed from baseline to final assessment among born-again Protestants, Catholics, and those with no religious affiliation, compared with Protestants not identifying as born-again. ... The findings of this study indicate that hippocampal atrophy in late life may be uniquely influenced by certain types of religious factors.”Of the 268 men and women over 58 years old in the study, a group of 19 had ‘no religious affiliation’ at all. I would have thought that these should have constituted the control group, rather than the ‘protestants not identifying as born-again’.
The problem with this study is that the 19 with NO RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION showed a significant (P<0.05) mean decrease of 0.28 mL in left hippocampal volume from baseline to end measurement (Table 2).
They could have concluded that both ‘religious affiliation’ and ‘non-religious affiliation’ are both associated with hippocampal atrophy.