Autism and atheism link??

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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... udy-points
-link-two.html


Post your thoughts.

1: The Daily Mail is only a very small step ahead of the Onion in terms of credibility. Take anything you read there for a grain of salt. Better yet, just avoid reading it altogether.

2: It wouldn't surprise me to find that more aspies tend to be atheists, since aspies tend to be less prone to the sort of cultural indoctrination that causes most people to be religious.

3: This reminds me of Mary and Max (Max is an atheist with AS. But he still wears his yarmulke. It keeps his brain warm). Good movie.

Some of things he said are interesting. For example, people on the autism spectrum tend to not understand parables and double meanings as well as NT's. The bible is filled with them.

By the way, I myself am agnostic. I can't prove that there is a god, nor can I prove there isn't. Also Atheists tend to be huge egomaniacs.

Not to turn this into a religious thread, but agnosticism has nothing to do with belief. You either do believe in a god, or you do not. Agnosticism refers to knowledge, not belief (the word is derived from the prefix a, meaning without, and gnosis, meaning knowledge, so it literally means "without knowledge"). Anyone with any small shred of intellectual honestly, atheist or theist, is agnostic. Claiming agnosticism when asked for belief, IMO, is just sidestepping the question.

That is an unqualified and diversive statement

Isn't church, the military and the police force a magnet for black and white thinking?? and morality holy rollers?

I'm an agnostic.....

I was raised Catholic, but became Agnostic in my teens. What I mean by agnostic is someone who doesn't know one way or the other if there is a god, or not. Aetheists believe there is not. Currently I am strongly leaning more toward intelligent design, as the universe, biology, and everything else is just too complex to have come about by chance.

As for evolutionists. If you need an eye you don't have time to evolve one. And, our eyes, even spider and fly eyes, are just too complex to have "evolved". That also applies to the bio-chemical processes that run our bodies, and the bodies of every other living thing. DNA and RNA look like a type of biological program code, too.

I also don't buy the time scales used by the evolutionists. I remember reading about a man who lost his keys in a cave and on returning there many years later, found them again. They had become part of a rock--mineral deposits had formed and covered them most of the way around. Also, things that evolutionists claim to be millions of years old would have turned to dust long before that.

So now I am pretty much in the intelligent design camp.

Only trend I've seen among autistics, as regards to religious/philosophical viewpoints, is that they are far more likely to be something we researched and determined on our own rather than drifting along with our cultures.

If that's the case, then in a country like the US, where the majority is religious, you get more autistic atheists; but in places where there is an atheist majority, you should get more religious autistics. I don't know whether it is; I've never seen the numbers. There's only this general tendency among autistic people not to pick up cultural information--to decide for yourself whether you think God exists and, if he does, what to do with that idea.

Among the autistic people I know, very few simply followed their parents or their church. Those that have similar beliefs to the culture around them didn't just drift into them--they did a lot of questioning. Actually, those seem to be the people who do the most questioning, because one of the questions they have to answer is, "Do I just believe this because people have been telling me it's true all my life?" I know that was true for me. My family is fundamentalist Christian--yes, THAT kind of fundamentalist--and they might have convinced me with the alluring black-and-whiteness of it all, were it not for the fact that I am capable of reading the Bible for myself and figuring out what it says within the context of history and the culture within which it was written. That made me think and question a lot. I'm still not done questioning, really; and maybe I never will be. I just know that the thing the fundamentalists are worshiping isn't the God of the Bible--it's their own superiority that they believe in, and not too much else.

I was also very skeptical of evolution, for basically the reasons you outline. My mind rebelled. "There just hasn't been enough time!" I cried. So please don't take this as an insult.

But I read a book called The Greatest Show on Earth, by Richard Dawkins. And maybe I'm just easily swayed, but ever since I read that book, I can no longer doubt that evolution is true. I recommend it.

There's a good deal of evidence for it, and I think something like it must have happened. But there are a lot of unanswered questions--a LOT. We don't know near as much about genetics as we need to know, nor about the history of the Earth's climate, etc.

The simplistic ideas they teach children in high school annoy me a good deal. The universe is more complex than that. When they teach them in high school about evolution and similar topics, they talk like it's all a done deal, like the theory's complete and has been for ages. In reality, all we have is a basic framework--the idea of natural selection, the idea of inherited traits, the idea of selection pressure. Beyond that, there's still so much to learn, so many gaps. It's not a done deal. We're only discovering some of this stuff. Even the fossils aren't all that conclusive. There are so many gaps, so many things we don't know yet. Some things are balanced precariously on a single specimen. We need more information.

Science and religion, by the way, are quite compatible. God is a God of truth and logic, and a lover of freedom. That he would have created a universe which works in such a way as to result in complex life like us makes sense to me. Deus ex machina was never his style--he likes people to work things out for themselves. If he sparked the Big Bang to give rise to a place where life might survive, that's quite compatible with science. The more I discover about the way the universe works, the more I think there is plenty of room for God in it--and the more I realize how pretentious it is to think that human beings are the most important thing in the universe.

It bothers me when people say things like this, because it seems like an extremely vague thing to say.

Science makes claims. Religion makes claims. It is true that in some cases, both sets of claims can be true at the same time.

For example, if your science says "We roughly understand what happened after the Big Bang", and your religion says "God caused the Big Bang", then there is no conflict. But most people's religion goes much further than that.

For example, maybe you count history as part of science. There is an obvious conflict between Christianity and history. Christianity claims that Jesus really was supernaturally raised from the dead. History tries to figure out what happened in the religious landscape of the Middle East, and it does not allow supernatural hypotheses. They are in conflict.

Or, if you claim that prayer causes God to interfere with the physical world, you are making a claim that is directly in conflict with the usual understanding of physics.

Religion is irrational, whereas the minds of people with ASDs are often inherently super-rational. Region doesn't make sense when people take it seriously. Emotions and social stuff often don't make sense at all either (belief and faith are emotions too). Super-rational thinking and irrational concepts are counter to one another.

Some have religion as a circumscribed interest though (whether active or in the past), which will make them interested in it.

Atheist here, of course (since as far back as I can remember).

One of my earliest memories is of my mother going on about God, and me thinking, "You must be kidding?" I have never believed in invisible supernatural beings.

I don't believe that there is a link between autism and atheism. However, I do believe that autistic people are unlikely to accept dogmas just because their family or the majority of the people in their locality believe in them (whether it is Biblical belief or atheism). Autistic people are more likely to research each apposing viewpoint and reach their own conclusion based upon research. I for example, based upon the evidence and research I have done moved from the faith of evolution to belief in the Bible. This is because I research the original wording as much as possible as well as historical, linguistic, and scientific evidence. Other autistic people may reach different conclusions based upon the research they have done.

If a so-called link exists between Aspies and atheists, it doesn't link me. I am a Christian---and Christianity wasn't forced upon me. It came after many years of careful thinking and meditation. I am not irrational. I am not giving into others. I am simply exercising my human right to do what I feel is right for me---and that is Christianity. But I will not force my beliefs on others---I simply relate it in my life if I am asked.

Like I said, this correlation doesn't exist where I live. But maybe auties who are atheists are somewhat dyslexic, there is a slight phonetic similarity between those words.

I'm a Christian and I'm not ashamed of it.