Autism and Atheism? What's the connection?

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Regarding the origional posters statement in the title and the first post of this thread, this I personally find to be untrue. One may certainly find that the members on this site are mostly atheists because the site owner has atheistically based views, so naturally the site has been designed from a predominately atheistic friendly viewpoint and moderated accordingly to the site owners requirements (Even though those who hold onto Godbelieving faiths are most welcome).
As a believer in God, one does tend to be limited, so many who share a God believing faith find this site a little too restricting and leave. (Is different in real life where one can speak whatever one wants that is appropiate to the conversation being discussed at the time).
I have lost quite a few site members who I liked to talk to due to this. No ones fault. Is just how it is, but please bear this in mind before one assumes that most who are on the spectrum are atheists. From those I actually know in person who I know are on the spectrum do believe in God. If I hid myself in sites that only catered for my personal beliefs, I could say the same but from the God believing perspective, so I am assuming your concepts are based upon your natural restrictive communication with like minded autistic individuals?

Back to the topic, autistic people I know can be either religious or not - but they seem more likely to stick out of their social environments with it.

Much of the cause for the belief in God comes from our social functions. The neurotypical, needing comfort and authority from other people, imagines an ultimate authority that will make everything right in the end. Since autists tend to be antisocial down to a neurological level, they don't conjure social relationships that aren't there, leading to a mechanistic understanding of the world that doesn't require God, beyond perhaps some final Providence.

I've been all over the place with this.

Lets just say that if you're analytic in your thinking, a lot of Christopher Hitchens observations can strike you intuitively and that's quite persuasive when you've been raised around young earth creationists or have had the types of nondenominational protestants in your life who treat the bible as something to wrap the entirety of existence around as literal. Heck, even just reading the bible with a mind for Mediterranean antiquity and it's mysticism, beliefs, cultures, astrotheology (Babylonians and Ptolemy), etc., it just becomes strikingly clear that you're dealing with a compendium of reworked ideas from other places.

So you might then find yourself agnostic drifting toward atheist, or even out and out atheist, and then there's an open question of what happens next. Do you end up in strange life emergencies where you notice bizarre synchronicities and acausal connections firing up from time to time but not constantly? Do you find yourself encountering these and other breaches in reductive materialism?

If none of that happens you may remain atheist / agnostic. If they do happen you're likely to at least consider some type of ground-level animism, possibly weaving in panpsychism or some organic / Darwinian form of idealism.

That's sort of the path it took for me, and I find myself in agreement with a lot of what Donald Hoffman and Chetan Prakash would say about the matter in their works (or Donald Hoffman in 'The Case Against Reality') to at least be approaching it right - ie. something like layers of self-aware conscious systems rubber-banded together, a lot like Hilary Putnam's functionalism with multiple realizability, and that also allows for actual mass minds of all sorts (which I think we do see some evidence of). I've also watched thousands of NDE stories by now and while I don't believe that they edify theism they do edify the position that consciousness is a brute force element of the universe that sits behind matter rather than being an emergent aspect riding on matter or made of neurons (to which. IMHO, there's nothing 'magic' about neurons). You also have Michael Levin and Karl Friston edifying consciousness as fractal, Michael may have solved the cell differentiation in fetal formation issue with his work on frogs, particularly that there is a software layer of communication across the cells that are passed by ion channels and you don't even need to know what happens at the gene level to guide these cells to form an eye in an unusual place, heck he can turn off and on chemical switches in flatworks that cause them to be one-headed or two-headed - both make the change and reverse it.

Atheism here gets to be a tricky term because, technically, you could call anyone whose an animist, a pantheist, or even a panentheist, an atheist if they don't believe in a personal God. This is where I also find Neoplatonism and its recent comeback interesting, as well as enjoying the renewed interest that John Vervaeke has in the topic (4E cognitive scientist from University of Toronto).

I do think 'naive realism' is on its way out, or at least it's only going to be an effective map for something deeper. We already know lots about the unconscious, elephant and rider, Daniel Kahneman's 'Thinking Fast and Slow'. We're discovering as well bit by bit that we are composite beings, that most likely when we dream it's something identical to a DMT trip - where you decompile to become the 'you' perspective, the other dream characters, and the landscape as well (a British guy who was experimenting with making a DMT vape decided to slowly approach 'breakthrough' or 'threshold' and he got to watch the decompiling process). That sits well with what Friston and Levin are looking at, ie. fractal layers of consciousness. I think recently Michael Levin was asked about whether or not ant colonies were conscious and he handled that question by saying that ant colonies would be a collective consciousness and that our own brains are this as well as they're so many billion neurons.

A world where I find that when I'm in a jam I can work with gods and goddesses to get myself through, and can even do so knowing that whether there's an actual god or goddess or just an archetypal template that I'm working with in my mind that I can achieve the same goals just by setting up the right springboards for myself - it seems deeply adaptive. Is there an 'Ancient of Days' sitting at the top of all of this who is 'like' the Christian God but too vast to have any direct contact with other than through our own conscious awareness existing at all? Hard to say, you probably won't find any direct worldly evidence of that, and that's something I have to remain agnostic about because I can't know without any persuasive direct experience.


For ultimate reality though, I really like how John Gray put it in this article: