Aspies, Autistic folks and religion/social/economic views

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Do you think there is a definite connection between being actually on the spectrum and your religious beliefs and your social or economic views? There seems to be a beliefs that being on the spectrum necessarily makes it impossible to be religious or makes it impossible to anything other than a social and economic liberal.

Does the connection exist or is it overblown? Can someone be on the spectrum and be a traditional Christian or a religious Jew or Hindu or anything of that nature? Or be libertarian or a Green party member or a fiscal,Constitutional conservative or anything like that?

I was wondering in part because I would like to connect with Aspies and Autistic people who are followers of any kind of religion and strongly believe in it. I would love to connect with neuro-atypicals who are Catholics, Protestants, Baptists, Methodists, Religious, practicing Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Confusionists and others. I am already excited about being amongst others who get me here, but would also be excited to be around those who follow a religion like the one above and at the very least do not attack religion and religious beliefs in that Richard Dawkins, DeGrasse Tyson, Bill Maher type of assault.

And I was wondering if this forum still has neuro-atypicals who run the whole gamut economically and socially and who believe everything from the economic modern liberalism to the libertarian, Fred Hayek school of economics to being more fiscally and socially liberal to being more conservative in both areas. And so i was wondering if we still have that kind of diversity in this neuro -atypical forum.

I can't imagine anything about Autism that would compel the Autistic to adopt any particular world view.

I see no immediate connection. This website alone covers a broad spectrum of beliefs, ranging from deeply religious to radically atheist and liberal and conservative, with all sides boasting a knowledge range spanning between "I'm well-read and highly knowledgeable about these subjects" to "I skimmed through a Wikipedia article once". I don't believe there's any connection between ASD and any particular religious, political or philosophical ideology.

I'd be interested to see scientific surveys of political views of autistics

"Scientific surveys" of "political views"?

By that I mean ones that are done by random sampling rather than internet polls.

Of course autism would have some effects on how one views of the world since autism changes how the brain works. Hence, it will create a different way to think. Of course there is many variables that can change peoples thoughts, but, I would think that having autism gives a person a certain a chain of events that will have an impact of thought processes.

Last edited by Orangez on 19 Jan 2015, 2:15 am, edited 1 time in total.

"If you've seen one child with autism, you've seen one child with autism."

It goes for adults, too.

One thing I have read is that those with autism are generally more likely to think it terms of the value of the individual and maybe to think in a cerebral way. And while there most definitely would not be a 1 to 1 correlation of any kind, there could be some sort of correlation between being an aspie and being more libertarian vs being a liberal or conservative authoritarian. Though i can be completely wrong of course. I know I believe in embracing individual beliefs and thought patterns and I feel authoritarianism whether from the left or the right tends to suppress this. I read authoritarian arguments from the right and left on political forums and feel that if I even try to understand the logic behind them I'll just get dizzy and pass out.

Politics and religion rely heavily on "belief". Sometimes it takes more than belief to accept something...
just a thought....

Classic liberal (called "libertarian" nowadays)
Atheist

That's me.

You could argue (I would) that those on the spectrum are more likely than NTs to reject the culture or religion that they grew up with due to being less socially connected to their birth culture or religion.

I was raised a Catholic but I never believed in god. I am technically now an agnostic but in practice I still act as if god or gods do not exist. I'm also a socialist who believes that wealth needs to be redistributed to ensure everyone has equal access to food, shelter, employment and healthcare. I don't really care who does that redistribution but I would prefer an anarchic system that doesn't rely on authoritarian enforcement.

There are people on this site with all sorts of political and religious views.

Like the internet in general, WP seems to skew to the left and liberal. In some ways that's unsurprising, as the left has historically been more concerned with the rights of the disabled than the right, and authoritarians tend to want us dead, but it could just be the internet thing.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson is pretty much as far from Dawkins or Maher as you can get, and even those two are only really opposed to fundamentalism and extremism.

If you mean "religious", as in "goes to church", then I'm not religious. If you mean "religious", as in "believes in God", then I'm religious. Regarding "politics", I'm almost never liberal.

I believe Tyson's pretty much gone out of his way to label himself an agnostic, despite a large portion of his fanbase adamantly wanting to label him an atheist. Tyson's pretty sensible about the whole thing, but Dawkins has just become insane in the last few years. I have no qualms with atheism in general, it's a valid ideology and there's been a lot of extremely intelligent writers and philosophers in said field (of which Dawkins was once), but Dawkins is an extremist in his own right who had come to redefine the concept of arrogance and seems just a few mildly racist and sexist Twitter posts away from proposing that we round up all the theists into detainment camps. I know a lot of atheists who don't even stand behind him anymore.

As far as Bill Maher, I'm not altogether familiar with his own views...I only rarely ever watched 'Politically Incorrect' back in the day, but I did see him in 'Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death', if that's worth anything.

I do not think there is any specific correlation.