The World's Largest Coalition of Nontheists and Nontheist Communities!

So, does Autism increase one's resistance to the religion virus?

Simply put, we tend to use more prefrontal cortex to compensate for our lack of instinctive/empathic communication. We tend to be more objective, more logical, more likely to require evidence before accepting an out-there claim and more likely to question even our own out-there claims.

While there are definitely religious Autistics (just visit Wrong Planet's Politics, Philosophy and Religion forum), it seems to me that if one could do a study, our numbers would come out with more Atheists per capita than NTs.

0 members like this

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Jo Jerome on August 23, 2010 at 10:52pm

True, and Aspies certainly aren't impervious to religion. I used to post on WrongPlanet.net a lot and boy the religion forum could get heated.

Still though, with objectivity (or lack thereof) and rationality being major factors, I still would bet our per capita Atheism ratio is a bit higher than NTs. Just a hunch!

Permalink Reply by Aggiememenon on January 11, 2012 at 8:51pm

Wasn't there a story in the headlines awhile back that for us on the spectrum, our brains kinda short-circuit on teleological reasoning...questions like "What is the lesson in these events having happened", i.e. attributing some kind of agency to the universe/God...strike us IMMEDIATELY as absurd and we're likely to just blurt out "nothing; stuff just happens, dude!" where as NT atheists will initially get sucked in and then reason out that it's an absurd proposition.

After getting my A.S. diagnosis, I have a deeper understanding of why people prattling on with their platitudes about "everything happens for a reason" has always pissed me off so very, very much. ;-)