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Do you feel good when you go to church ?  I'm not talking about dropping the guilt for all the times you don't, but a true, down deep feeling of peace? That's your brain rewarding you, according to newswise.com. A new study has found that religious and spiritual experiences activate the brain reward circuits in much the same way as love, sex, gambling, drugs and music, report researchers at the University of Utah School of Medicine . “We’re just beginning to understand how the brain participates in experiences that believers interpret as spiritual, divine or transcendent,” says senior author and neuroradiologist Jeff Anderson, M.D., Ph.D. “In the last few years, brain imaging technologies have matured in ways that are letting us approach questions that have been around for millennia.” Specifically, the investigators set out to determine which brain networks are involved in representing spiritual feelings in one group, devout Mormons, by creating an environ...

Atheist? Or do you believe in God?  A new study says if you're the former, you're smarter. According to Matthew Mientka at medicaldaily.com, "A review of scientific studies finds that people who hold a more naturalistic view of the world are generally smarter than those who believe in God" (my capital "G"). Mientka reports that a researcher at the University of Rochester found “a reliable negative relation between intelligence and religiosity” in 53 studies. But while 10 of the studies showed a positive correlation, only two of them showed a significant link, he writes. My husband -- and my 12-year-old, who devastated me when he told me -- do not believe in God.  My husband, who is in his mid-60's, is now saying maybe there's someone up there.  But Phillip, who will be bar mitzvahed next year, calls himself an atheist. Maybe that's because there's some confusion in our house.  I'm Christian, a Presbyterian (I call it the "w...