Being atheist and ASD

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It seems like a larger portion of Aspies are atheist than the general population. As an atheist myself, with bias of course, I would say we tend to be rational thinkers. But I dislike the correlation between the two because then NT's can use our "mental disorder" to explain away our beliefs. Have you ever experienced this? I doubt that most people know it's even an issue, besides Autism specialists I suppose. But I would be reluctant to tell someone I was both of these things. Atheists and Autistics already have such a hard time of it without being both.

I'm both, and I have no qualms about people knowing about it. I think someone suggested I was only an atheist due to being an aspie once here on this site, though they may just have been trolling.

Agnostic Atheist and Autistic here.

I'm an Aspie who believes in God.

Generally the are more male atheists than female atheists out there, and hence autism is theorized to a form of 'extreme male brain'.... then there might be some correlation.

Also dopamine been linked to autism in some studies, and this compound itself was also linked to belief/disbelief in other studies.

I've often felt like my brain's a 700w subwoofer running on a 50w amp.

Someone on here recently reminded me of the likelihood that autism's correlated with a lack of synapse pruning and that could explain it - ie. not enough ATP coming out of the mitochondria to get them going, and it's probably I was able to take something like LSD and snap the buzz into something closer to a higher-functioning sobriety before it snapped back on me.

People I think tend to treat those they see as imbalanced or eccentric, ie. extreme in any regard, as incapable of assessing the human condition well and they tend to write off people's opinions in that category as stilted or only partially perceptive. True, I couldn't imagine being a husband or father and there could be concerns which would go along with that which might tip my politics or what matters most to me slightly in one direction or another but I think of it like this - you usually won't have your opinion discounted unless it's either particularly utopian (in the case of dealing with generally fair-minded people) or in the possibility that you're just around very dogmatic people who need to believe something and are looking to write off the opposition in one way or another. The later you can almost always depend on to say things like this, with the former though you have to be careful because they might be saying something worth reflecting on.

That and I don't think atheism is necessarily eccentric in the rational direction. If you're the kind of person who tries their hardest to stop out the existence of subjective consciousness, tries their best to write off conscious experience as a hallucination, or chastises agnostics for being weak - you might be in a position to learn something. OTOH if you get that life is complicated, if you get that human beings need ritual, and if you get that evolutionary wiring means we have fixed needs that we're compelled to gratify and that this has immutable consequences in how human societies work, then you're probably rather unlikely to trip someone's radar as impractical or particularly stilted.

So let me get this straight.

This is what you are worried about:

that folks will think that your DISBELIEF in stories about talking snakes, virgin births, angels talking to dudes, voices from burning bushes talking to dudes, and the sun standing still in the sky, and so on... is a symptom of a mental disorder?

You are afraid that if you express doubt about crazy stuff that you will be labeled crazy, but if you express belief in crazy stuff that you will NOT be labeled "crazy"?

Is it rational to commit to something you don't know?

Some great mathematicians who were Christians: Euler, Riemann, and Gödel.

Gödel even came up with a formal logical argument for the existence of God.

Seems a little weird of an idea. Scales are not always built with a zero. Kelvin is a good example, there s no zero in kelvin. A scale can be built with the two extremes of a scale.

I have no proof or evidence that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob exists or does not exist.

If there is a Real God I am sure It is nothing like the cartoon characters created by the various cults, churches, religions and sects. The Jewish and Christian religions were founded before there was science. So the basic concepts are very anthropomorphic and philosophically primitive. Islam is not much better off.

The Deists have a much more reasonable notion of God than does Judaism, Christianity or Islam.

What do you mean by saying "the Kelvin Scale doesnt have a zero"?.

The whole reason that Dr. Kelvin invented the Kelvin Scale was so that scientists would have a temperature scale that has its zero point set at the point of zero thermal motion of molecules (ie at zero heat) which is "absolute zero" in the Kelvin Scale ( which is -273.15 centigrade, or -459.67 Fahrenheit).

And what does it have to do with atheism anyway?

The point is that absolute zero is a theoretical concept. Absolute zero cannot exist. Scientist have gotten extremely close though. I was relating the idea to an above posters "proof" of god. The point was that scales can have ends, but not perfect ends.

He was responding to rama's link (where it says "formal logical argument").

Here is the symbolic argument, and here a helpful explanation.

I interpret,
-necessarily to mean "in all possible worlds"
-possibly to mean "in some possible world"

To completely understand the argument is hard, at least on first try. Nevertheless, I doubt the first and fourth axioms. Especially the first one, because it allows for vacuous truth.

Nothing in the proof seems to indicate a personal god. I'm not sure of uniqueness either. Positive/negative properties are only associated with conscious living creatures, or in relation to conscious living creatures. Our physiology defines what is positive and negative. What could be positive to you might not be so to another species (or another man). Therefore, a property is positive or negative in a relative manner, but not without bounds (because of the way the universe operates). Therefore, if God exists, then God has to be experienced subjectively, at least.

Female aspie athiest here