Faith in God can really relieve pain

London (PTI): "Religion is the opiate of the people" -- Karl Marx had famously said. But can one's faith in God really ease pain? 'Yes', say scientists.

A team at Oxford University has based its findings on an experiment, in which 12 Roman Catholics and 12 atheists were "tortured" with electric shocks as they studied two paintings -- Virgin Mary and Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine.

The subjects spent half-an-hour inside an MRI scanner, receiving a series of 20 electric shocks in four sessions and each time they had to rate how much it hurt on a scale of 0 to 100 as they looked at the paintings. The scientists found that the Catholics seemed to be able to block out much of the pain. the rest