No, they are different mental illnesses.
Being autistic, it’s a lot easier for me to not believe in God than to believe in God and accept that he had a better reason for making me the way he did than merely being the sort of demiurge who drinks on the job and was having an off day at the moment of my conception.
It’s also easier to not believe in God and chalk up my existence to bad luck than to accept that my conception was basically God’s malevolent joke on my parents since my mother was on the pill and my father was wearing a condom.
I’m autistic and animistic. I believe that there’s conscience in all, and that we should handle other beings like we handle other persons: with respect and some caution. I grew up catholic, tended towards buddhism for a while, was non-religious for the longest time, and then started taking to animals and plants and landscape - some might say I lost my mind, but it felt more like finding it. It’s a private practice of consciously having a stream of thought passing my mind as I meet other beings in my daily life, and trying to get to know them and notice them. A silent conversation with the non-human, I guess you could call it praying, only there’s no worship, as I’m also anarchist. I communicate with whoever is happy to meet me eye to eye.
I’d say the whole thing is more pragmatic than religious. There’s no church, no celebrations, I’m not part of a group, I’m just a private nutter talking to rocks because it suits me and works to maintain my wellbeing.
Considering there’s very little logic, reason, or empirical information to be found in religion, I would say yes, it does. I would say that it affects the religious beliefs in such a way that there probably wouldn’t be much of any belief at all in the majority of us with ASD.
Of course, this comes with the digression that I understand that I do not speak on behalf of all autistic people.
I don’t know that it does, but I can see how it could.
One way that neurodivergence can manifest is as a relative inability to simply assume things - a relatively outsized need for clear evidence on which to base a conclusion. And religion is notably devoid of actual evidence.
That’s the main reason I don’t believe in any higher power. Sure there might be one, but where’s that evidence? I can’t use any of my senses to reach a solid conclusion on that subject. I’m quite happy to just let other people deal with religion
Yeah - I don’t even really understand how all of that works. I see that people apparently sincerely believe, but I have no idea how - what it is that goes on inside their brains that allows them to make that leap to actually believing.
Generally it’s the lack of things going on inside their brain. Any level of critical thinking should make one agnostic at the very least
For me it was ironically a theoretical physics video that made a religious belief really make sense. It was a video explaining how we can conceptualize 11 dimensions that would be possible on the information we collectively know now as humans. The way it made me really think about how truly expansive space and time are really made me think that “that’s not impossible to think that there is a 11th dimension being that has some agenda that we cannot understand.”
I imagine it’s like a child trying to understand something beyond their comprehension but it doesn’t change how true it is, like “brush your teeth because it lowers your risk of gums bleeding and leaking bacteria into your bloodstream and eventually causing vegetative infective endocarditis.” They’re just not going to understand that yet, but still reap the benefits later if they brush their teeth. I think it’s much easier and safer for the kid to say, “I’m just not going to brush my teeth.”
Bottom line is, I think that’s why it’s called faith, because it’s just not definitively provable or disprovable. I have personally had many tangible positive benefits in my life from having a faith but don’t think that should be forced upon anyone.
And I know many people in western cultures equate religion to Christianity, but just a quick reminder that there are many many faith systems that exist in the world.
The way it made me really think about how truly expansive space and time are really made me think that “that’s not impossible to think that there is a 11th dimension being that has some agenda that we cannot understand.”
Absolutely.
But that’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about making the leap from recognizing that such a being could exist to believing that such a being does exist. That, to me, is so bizarrely irrational that I can’t even work out how it is that people apparently actually do it.
I guess I didn’t explicitly say it, but that was actually the moment that I went from could exist to must exist. I know it sounds pretty crazy to commit to such an irrational thing. I have a better understanding now of why it’s called practicing a faith, because you don’t just immediately do it and you’re done. It constantly gets tested. So, there wasn’t one moment that just flipped all the way from not believing anything to believing everything, it’s a spectrum.
