We shouldn't associate atheism and autism.

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It just seems to me that intentionally choosing to say a potentially offensive word and then immediately drawing more attention to its potential offensiveness by feeling the need to add an extraneous side note explaining its context is a wholly unnecessary and easily avoidable waste of time and effort.

I read it and understood it in context. The footnote is the only reason I even noticed it as potentially offensive...

Yeah, I mean, if he just left it alone without the footnote, I'd have simply thought "eh, I would've used a different word, but whatever". However, since he outright called attention to it, he not only emphasizes the taboo behind the word but blatantly makes known that he refuses to be polite to anyone who might be offended by its other meaning.

Even if the word wasn't possibly* offensive, if you use a word and feel the need to attach a footnote saying it means a different word, then...what's the point?
*By "possibly" I meant "potentially"

I wasn't suggesting you're wrong. It was just a comment on how I saw it.

Ignore imposing Atheists, and they would soon exhaust their time and money in a vain attempt to recruit the last three individuals on the planet who don't already know too well about their ideology.

I've been an atheist for decades and I've never even thought of trying to convert anybody to atheism. None of the atheists I know have done that either. All we are trying to do is establish our rights and stop some Christians from trying to put their beliefs into law and force us to live by their ideas of how we should live. Take that stuff away and we will hardly even mention it to anyone.

You raise some interesting points (for the record, and for what it is worth, I am a Christian with Asperger's Syndrome myself) but I am not sure that I agree with your way of framing the debate. Persecution and demonisation are utterly wrong, and I do not think I like the implications - surely the results of online surveys are beyond any individual's control; of course those who post on online fora may not be representative of the wider population, but I do not see why the relative proportions of atheists in autistic and neurotypical populations is even remotely relevant to the issues of how neurotypicals and those of us on the Autistic Spectrum should respond to each other: I would also be worried about the, probably unintentional, impression that some, whether atheists or adherents of a theist faith tradition themselves, might get of intolerance and demonisation of atheists from within the Spectrum.

To be honest, on Wrong Planet and on other partially comparable online social media platforms I have encountered a range of theological positions, and surely it is not helpful to frame the debate in a way that singles out some group, whether a majority within the diverse category of those with autism or not, so that they feel unwelcome. That is not to say that I am so illogical as to suggest that mutually irreconcilable positions on a truth-claim (in this case the existence of God, however understood) can both be right, just that people need to get along, and furthermore there is not a monopoly of moral righteousness or of intellectual rigour on either, or rather any (for this is not a binary divide given the many faith-traditions and philosophies) side of the admittedly rather complex question (the word God and its counterparts in other languages have a range of associations in different human minds, and while I am committed to certain views, I am wary of being too quick to arrogantly and blasphemously claim complete comprehension of God's nature or mind; there is also not just one atheistic school of thought, nor a simple relationship to moral character nor action).

A valid point; considering that no adherent of a faith tradition or philosophy enjoys being on the receiving end of persecution, it should be easy to empathise with this feeling. That said, this is a complex area, as some would retort which laws could be regarded as interfering? Some ethical positions are shared by adherents of a range of faith traditions, some of these positions would be agreed upon by some atheists. Different human beings set moral boundaries in different places, and it is difficult to see where to find consensus; from some perspectives Christians and other faith traditions might seem to be imposing their own views (though there are also differences on many specific issues within at least some faith traditions) while from another some notional "secular" or "atheist" ideology (as though there were only one, or as though its values were automatically opposed to those of all theistic faith traditions, which is a gross oversimplification from a historical point of view. I am afraid that this post is probably getting somewhat vague, and I will welcome any questions or suggestions as to how I could make myself clearer.

Which ideology would that be?



Not sure why such a narrow data set is relevant to, well, anything.



Reddit is hardly representative of the internet either. Google 'Atheism' and you'll get about 24 million hits. Google Islam and you'll get roughly 16 times that number. That's just one religion.



Ignoring the obviously terrible advice, and the logical dissonance between this and the previous sentence, what basis would people have for this conclusion?

I know there are atheists who can be quite vocal about it, but I've met far more proselytising Christians than atheists. I don't see atheists standing in the high street every weekend with a loudspeaker declaring how their belief is the only correct one, or handing out leaflets further along the street to similar effect, or approaching people at bus stops uninvited to lecture them on Bertrand Russell. And I live in a country where 86% of people don't regularly attend religious services.

It makes a further mockery of that earlier statement if you consider that Walrus and I follow very different ideologies, yet I'm in complete agreement here.

I think calling atheism an ideology is kind of acceptable informally, even if it isn't strictly accurate. He didn't say it was a religion or anything.

One can, of course, follow multiple ideologies, and different ideologies can share elements, and people with very different views can share an ideology. For example, I believe we're both republicans, or at best in favour of a neutered monarch. That's an ideology. Hitler and Stalin had very different economic ideologies, but shared authoritarian ideologies.

How is ideology a non belief in God? I don't see it as an ideology. I don't shape my daily life or anything else around the idea there is no God. I don't believe in mythology, that doesn't make that an ideology either. If there were no religious people, I wouldn't think much, if at all, about the lack of a God. It's the belief by others who like to impose laws based on restrictive beliefs in 'sin' that cause us to think about it.

It's only an ideology to the extent that people casually conflate "ideology" and "belief".

Making it doubly illogical.

Atheism is not an ideology.

Right, but it's the sort of thing that I can just shrug off rather than feeling the need to pick someone up on it when they use it loosely.