Autism and Religion

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Whether Jesus is the messiah or not thats for you to decide, but obviously if you are a straightfoward Christian, your answer to that question would be yes, he is the messiah. However, have you ever thought about the possibility of God cursing you, or more extremely, God might not exist? We're born, or maybe, develop, with this neurodevelopmental disorder known as Asperger Syndrome, High functioning autism, normal autism, or whatever you'd like to call it. The question is could possibly God have any effect on the chances of having this, and therefore affect our beliefs and our religious practices? For me, I always kinda tended to think, maybe, I'm cursed and the fact I have a high functioning autism is proof of that. Otherwise, I would be born 100% normal. But you could say a similar thing about blind people or people with one hand or one leg, and so on, so it depends on the way of looking at things. But would you honestly say God cursed you possibly and thats why you have a disability, and maybe even went as far as to stop believing in God or Jesus? Yeah, its a tough question I know.

No I'm not cursed because autism isn't a curse for me. If anything it's kind of a blessing.

I am a nonbeliever and atheist. The possibility that God could exist doesn't even occur to me. I know there are autistic folks who are believers, but for me I consider my inability and unwillingness to set aside known things and logic an autistic trait. I just don't and can't believe in things that are both very nebulous and at the same time very fanciful and laboriously embroidered (which to me adds to their doubtfulness), and that don't seem at all real or true to me.

I think that there are many mysteries that humans don't know about and wouldn't understand if they did know about them, but I don't think that any of the myths that humans came up with are the answer to any of those unknowns.

But I know people's faith is important to them, so I respect that about them, in the same way I wouldn't say an insulting thing about someone's mother.

I see. Its good you look at positive side of things or have a generally positive view on disability.

Did you religious beliefs remain the same throughout your life, or did your disability change it somehow, at certain times?

I'm an atheist, but I was raised a Jehovah's Witness. I don't mind being autistic. It's not something that I would change about myself if I could.

Yes, I have thought those things a few times in my life.

Scripture says what happened and why such imperfections exist, a lot of the material is widely rejected, but it says and the message it gives is coherent, which also is a thing which is widely rejected.

Somewhere in the past humanity invited evil in to the world in an effort to become like God.
Literal fruit?
Literal tree?
Literal deceptive serpent?
Literal evil in a specific intelligent entity who is out to corrupt and destroy what God has created, especially humanity?
Maybe.

Whatever the case, the knowledge of good and evil was invited in to humanity & with that came not merely knowing about evil but also the material experience of physical evil.
With that evil including the matter of genetic faults, of physical faults, of psychological faults.
Additionally, the material of this earth was affected both by that evil itself and by a curse as a result of the willful disobedience, insurrection even, which invited that evil in to the system.

So yes, a curse is in play; a generalized curse impacting everyone and everything in and on this Earth, and the universe even.

Is any one of us so personally special as to be specifically and individually cursed? Probably not.
But we are special enough to be offered that messiah.
Who is said to eventually and eternally remove that generalized curse.

Additionally, Genesis 3:15 speaks of a genetic war which will be allowed to run for a while.
Why is it allowed to run a course?
That specific 'why' is not directly stated in scripture.
What is stated is a trend of decline that humans and humanity have been and will be unable to stop at both a personal and societal level, and then an end crisis and then a renewal.
Also stated is that there is an active agent which pushes and promotes that trend of decline, again, at both a personal and societal level.
Also stated is that the sides in the contest are binary, one either rejects or accepts, there is no halfway, no compromise.
Again, a set of things which are widely rejected by humanity.

Also, both illustrated and stated outright, is that this life on this planet is not the full experience of a person's life.
There will come a future endless existence, where people get to choose in this life which one of two possible eternal existences they want, which offers a choice of a coming eternity in a renewed body on a renewed Earth in a renewed universe without the various and sundry deformations, failures, dysfunctions, and defects.
Without those in that moment and eternally free of the possibility of having those.
Those things too are often widely dismissed by the peoples of this planet.

So, while experiencing the stress and struggles and symptoms of having these bodies in this world saturates and even sometimes overwhelms or minds and senses, the question is, which choice of eternal experience does one desire?
One can stay with the familiarity this disrupted system and its defective default condition after what is characterizable as 'malware' was invited in to this life at some point in the past, or one can choose the eventual reboot of a restored system.

Religionists of any type or tradition who assert that any deviation from "normal" is a curse make me angry.

They also seem to view people who are poor, injured, ill, or otherwise unfortunate as being "cursed".

I tend to ghost such people when they out themselves in this way.

I'm secular anyway, but I'll offer my thoughts:

1. My own ASD is a mixed bag of strengths and weaknesses, so I've often thought that I'd be wary of accepting an irreversible cure even if it had no side effects. Even if I were to accept the claims of religion about the cause of illness, it would still seem very odd to imagine that ASD could have been given to me as a curse. All the scriptural ailments that Jesus is said to have healed were much more clear-cut and negative.

2. Talking of cures, various preachers claim that prayer and faith-healing can be applied to autism with great success, so anybody religious enough to think that their autism is a divine curse might also think there'd be a path to getting shut of it. It's sometimes said that such interventions don't work on non-believers such as myself, but they've also claimed that kids have been thus cured even though they've been too young to be aware of what was being attempted on their behalf, let alone believe the cure was going to work. So it seems that simply not believing doesn't necessarily stop it working, as long as you have a caregiver who has the required faith.



Probably too late for me, as I no longer have any caregivers and the preachers would probably deem me old enough to grow my own faith, which is kind of ironic because I've long thought that cognitive faith is a non-rational thing that children mature out of if they develop a sufficiently rational, inquiring mind, and that once they've managed that, there's no turning back while they still have the power to reason coherently. Still, as I see ASD as a brain-wiring difference with biological causes, benefits and disadvantages, and not a cosmic curse with a cosmic cure, it doesn't bother me.

Are you saying that God is cursing people who are born with certain issues?
If God is Life and Life exists than God exists, right?
Why do want to talk about all of this? What does this subject have to do with ASD?

Since you are from Israel, I assume your take of God is from a Jewish perspective. There are times in the history of Israel when God cursed people. However, it was usually for a reason. For example the practice of throwing your children into a fire to sacrifice them to Molech as practiced by some in Canaan was insufficient for immediate punishment but needed to accrue (hundreds of years) to a level for them to be exterminated.

If one considers Aspergers as a neurological variant and not a "curse from God", one might see it as being similar to being very short or very tall. There are unique circumstances for most people who are on the fringe of a "normal" distribution.

To establish it as a curse, you would have to establish that there even is a God (which I feel is fairly obvious but understand that most reject). Secondly, you would have to establish a basis for such a "curse". If you assert a whimsical basis, you redefine the God of Israel as similar to those of ancient Greece.

An additional consideration is the assumption that the highest good is to have an easy and comfortable life. Given this criteria, blaming God for everything from a stubbed toe to a global war starts to paint him as the enemy of mankind. It is perhaps the difficulties in life that are the only way for us to have a chance to escape our tendency towards self-destructive and consumptive selfishness. We can see this by contrasting the Horatio Alger protagonist that overcomes obstacles to achieve "success" as opposed to the spoiled brat who because of every advantage he was given continues to live a life of dissipation.

The sufferings of others seem far worse than mine.

If someone says "why does God allow children to get cancer?" that would stump me if I were religious.

But my aspergers (being so trivial a problem when compared to the above example- on top of being countered by the fact that I was born into an affluent country at an affluent time...and am not some outcast in India)never enters my mind as something that would threaten "the faith" of a religious person (if I were religious).

So your question seems like "blasphemy" even to me (and Im not even religious).

But maybe your autism makes you suffer more than mine does me. Or maybe you're just suffering in general and you blame it all on autism when its not all caused by autism. Whatever.

Autism is neither a curse on me nor an opportunity for others to use me as their "angel" to prove their faith by being nice to me. It's something I struggle with sometimes and, at other times, find to be to my advantage in a variety of ways (because differing vantage points are advantageous for a variety of things, such as creative expression).

But I sure think it's a good test of the nature of a person's faith if they have to view me as cursed or as having my sole value in life be that I give them an opportunity to be nice to someone they otherwise wouldn't want to be, were it not for their religion. In other words, why can't a person just see me as being another person, out of simple human decency?

People are different from each other. It's a fact no religion can erase. I'm not against any religion, but I do object to how people use it. Same with science. Eugenics isn't better just because people have tried to use science to defend it. Eugenics is pseudo-science. As far as I'm concerned, using religion to justify bigotry is pseudo-religion. And that includes when people have tried to to codify it in religious texts. Scriptures may be inspired, but it's not only that which is holy which inspires people when they write. People are flawed, so the inspiration is filtered through their imperfections.

There's nothing sacred about prejudice and intolerance over plain old human variety. But bigots would have you believe you're worse than a murderer for being socially awkward. Don't believe it!

Seems to me we should consider other alternatives besides 1) God is omnipotent, and 2) there is no God. The mainstream theology of the monotheistic religions has emphasized the omnipotence of God so much that people don't think of any other possibility.

There is no omnipotent God in Buddhism or Taoism. In polytheistic religions, omnipotence is not even a possibility, because there are multiple goddesses and gods. Aristotle (in contrast to his scholastic interpreters) said that the first cause is the highest good and a contemplative intellect, which is a pure "act", having no power whatsoever. Rather than creating and governing the world, Aristotle's good works exclusively as an attractor for natural potentialities.

If you don't assume that the good in the world depends on an omnipotent power exercising particular providence, there is no more "problem of evil".

Indeed. "The will of God" cannot be legitimately used to derive any conclusion whatsoever. What is implicitly being appealed to is a human authority claiming to know the will of God.

Plato in the Euthyphro had Socrates argue that it is wrong to say that a thing is holy because the gods love it. Rather, it is better to say that the gods love it because it is holy.

Picking up on this theme, Leibniz in Meditation on the Common Concept of Justice wrote that to say that justice and goodness depend upon an arbitrary will "would destroy the justice of God. For why praise him because he acts according to justice, if the notion of justice, in his case, adds nothing to that of action? And to say… my will takes the place of reason, is properly the motto of a tyrant”.

So appeals to God do not get us off the hook from needing to determine for ourselves among us humans what is reasonable and good.

It seems very unlikely that gods exist, I feel comfortable with the belief that gods do not exist.

I'm not entirely convinced that Jesus is a single, actual historical figure, but even if he isn't the concept of a messiah seems utterly irrelevant outside of one ancient cult's beliefs, alongside the other faiths spawned from it.

It's as likely that Jesus was the son of a god as it is that Herakles was.

Among the ancient Greeks, the chief religious "authorities" were poets. The historical Homer is a bit shadowy and may have been a composite, but Hesiod was definitely a historical individual. I like the idea that religion is poetry. I've also heard that some Shiites regard literal interpretation of scripture as blasphemy -- if it is sacred, it is supposed to be figurative. But they rely on an authoritative human interpreter, which can also be very dangerous.

Prior to the advent of Christianity, none of the world's religions really had a hardened orthodoxy. The Christian church from very early times had a unique political dimension, aiming at social dominance. After the conversion of Roman Emperor Constantine, the church systematically used Roman political power to enforce orthodoxy in a heretofore unprecedented way, and to persecute pagans. Then this kind of thing started to spread around the world. A narrow Zoroastrian orthodoxy established itself in Persia; the Hindu renaissance kicked the Buddhists out of India; and so on. Gibbon in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire wrote that Attilla the Hun had a more tolerant policy on religion than the Christian Roman empire did.

But history develops unevenly. At the time of the Crusades, the Islamic and Jewish worlds were far more educated and sophisticated than Christian Europe. But as a result of contact, the Christian world became less insular, and the high middle ages were born. I'm no Thomist, but I think the compromise Aquinas worked out to make the teaching of Aristotle acceptable over the objections of hardliners was historically very progressive. And figures like Meister Eckhart show a far more interesting version of Christianity than we get from today's fundamentalists. But what really amazes me is that the Church set up universities all over Europe to teach Aristotle. Yes, they superimposed very non-Aristotelian definitions of God and the soul, to be compatible with orthodoxy. But this opened up a tremendous diversity of development that led directly to the modern world.

Then we come to paradoxes like the fact that the height of the European witch-burning insanity occurred not in medieval times, but during the sectarian religious wars of the early 17th century -- i.e., in early modern times.

In the 19th and early 20th century, it seemed like narrow-minded orthodoxy was on the retreat. But somehow it made a huge comeback in the later 20th century.

In the case of Islamic extremism in particular, we can largely thank the CIA for it. Up through World War II, that stuff was dying out in the Islamic world. But then during the Cold War, the CIA gave major backing to the most extreme religious reactionaries, because they were strongly anti-Communist.

I don't have a good explanation for the seeming increase in fundamentalism in the U.S., except that the U.S. began in significant part as a refuge for religious fanatics. For example, the Puritans moved to New England because they thought the Church of England was too liberal. What maybe makes American fundamentalism so visible today is the way it has become politicized, which is a new development of the later 20th century. Maybe there really aren't that many more fundamentalists here than there already were; it's just that they have become aggressively political.

Last edited by notSpock on 30 Jun 2023, 12:25 am, edited 4 times in total.