I foolishly believe that religios must be honest, and every so often I would like to wallow in reading the Daily Mail and Express, think David Cameron and Maggie are wonderful, think the tea party and creationists make sense, think global warming is a conspiracy and all the other cud chewing stuff like accepting jebus as my lawd and saviour and attending Alpha courses and listening to Premiere and watching the God Channel.

What do others do to stop themselves drowning? Are we a bit like those sharks that if they stop swimming they drown?

I'm more like a bird that plummets if I stop flapping. I'm not high on the autism scale like many of the rational machines here. I thread a thin line between non-belief and belief. When I was younger I used to believe all paths lead to God. I think that's my saving grace and kept me away from outright belief. I could never commit to a path so I just remain stand off-ish until one of them becomes viable. But that looks less and less likely.

I would love to get some 'awakening' or some injection of conviction, some lease of power that's going to set my world on fire but I think it's a pipe-dream. Even religious people who claim to get this still don't do anything more with their life than what they can opt to do with their religious group. Hardly the Nietzschean free-spirit.

I thought this was going to be about Sith Lords. I want to be a Sith Lord.

I must be autistic, because It takes no amount of effort to continue my disbelief. I don't lose a second of sleep over it.
I don't want to die either, but lying to myself about it won't stop it from happening.
It may sound depressing, but I enjoy myself immensely.

If I want to revel in fantasy, I'll choose a more interesting topic than Jesus Christ.
I'll spare the details.

Thank you for the thought provoking comments. I definitely have two sides, but the rational side gets tired! Fascinating some people seem not to have these battles!

If it's true that many of us are wired for belief then it makes sense that our freedom from superstitious thinking would have to be something won through investigation. My natural inclination was always to the woo side of things, it wasn't until I heard alternatives that made more sense that I turned away from them. I'm not a one of these geniuses that can think entirely for myself, I needed to read people like Derren Brown to snap me out of my multitude of supernatural beliefs, not necessarily god ones. In fact I went to his book Tricks of the Mind thinking illusion was something it wasn't. I'm not even sure what I was expecting. I was knocked back by the mundaness of a lot of the mind tricks. Almost disappointed.

But I still listen to songs like this, about a man going to the electric chair in denial of his undefined crime until he cracks, presumably right before he dies, and repents to God and I wonder why it resonates with me so much.



Original version.



Is it because of my Catholic upbringing? Or because there is simply something so human about it which doesn't need to go beyond the chemicals in our brain? Or is there truly something trancendant going on here?

s it because of my Catholic upbringing?

Spike Milligan was spot on about this - once a catholic.

If it is not hard wired it is not difficult to move people to the dark side.

On a world wide basis there is a huge amount of pro woo propaganda, including stuff like Tories have a natural right to rule, and weird stuff like the free hand of the market.

I think Britain has lost a cutting edge of intelligence somehow. We find it very difficult to think things through properly and Tory propaganda over many years has caused real damage.

This from the Lancet is an example. Can you imagine people queuing up to buy a government report?

http://download.thelancet.com/flatconte ... 602876.pdf

Is it only males that have contributed to this thread so far?

How is there a direct correlation between being autistic and being rational?

I am diagnosed with Asperger´s and I rank pretty high on them scales.
But good lord am I naive. Whenever I read something, intuition immediatly forces me to blindly believe it, that is, unless I am more knowledgeable on the subject than the author.

Luckily, natural cause somehow managed to install a reflex programm on my hard drive, which makes me confirm information immediatly after retrieval.
But It was a long way until then, I believed in God until I was 14 years old, believed in the goodness of newspapers and magazines until I was 16 and in the competence of teachers and authorities until just recently.

And If I remember correctly, that behaviour actually fits. Being naive is an often cited personality trait with autists.

I remember reading that autistic people can't understand things like 'god' as its meaningless to them. They get confused even when you say things like 'it's raining cats and dogs' because they can't see how that could be logically possible. Maybe I got it wrong.

Clive Durdle wrote:Thank you for the thought provoking comments. I definitely have two sides, but the rational side gets tired! Fascinating some people seem not to have these battles!

I in no way have "two" sides. When I was out I was out. There is not even the slightest chance I could go back.

Animavore wrote:I remember reading that autistic people can't understand things like 'god' as its meaningless to them. They get confused even when you say things like 'it's raining cats and dogs' because they can't see how that could be logically possible. Maybe I got it wrong.

To some extent.

It can be the case, that autists do not understand sarcasm or take things literally. But there are variations of traits in diverse intensities for everything.

But understanding god is no problem at all, autists do not have a built in fallacy detector, the problem of understanding derives from a lack of comprehension of human emotion, pronounciation and social "signs". There are probably alot of autistic believers.

RationalVegan wrote:

Animavore wrote:I remember reading that autistic people can't understand things like 'god' as its meaningless to them. They get confused even when you say things like 'it's raining cats and dogs' because they can't see how that could be logically possible. Maybe I got it wrong.

To some extent.

It can be the case, that autists do not understand sarcasm or take things literally. But there are variations of traits in diverse intensities for everything.

But understanding god is no problem at all, autists do not have a built in fallacy detector, the problem of understanding derives from a lack of comprehension of human emotion, pronounciation and social "signs". There are probably alot of autistic believers.

I admit I got all this info about autism from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Animavore wrote:I admit I got all this info about autism from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Now that would also be a nice example of uncritical behaviour. I have been trying to restrain myself from commiting this fallacy for a long time now, but it still happens from time to time, I discuss a subject and then I suddenly notice that I actually have no idea wether my sources are reliable or not.

But autism as "high-intelligence-rational-disorder" is the common media view. The funny thing is tough, that most likely, even if the author or producer never stated that their character is an autist, people still think them to be one.
Another example would be The Big Bang Theory´s Sheldon Cooper, who displays some attributes and at the same time does the stereotype justice.

laklak wrote:I thought this was going to be about Sith Lords.

I was hoping for, or expecting, something like this:

I may also be on the neurodiverse continuum at an extreme, but I have also been well marinaded in the Holy Spirit, but did do my A level Maths paper in half the allotted time then spent the rest of the time checking it, so probably 100%!

My thoughts are that no two brains are alike, and anyone neurodiverse is even more diverse, so it is not obvious there would be any communalities say on religion. For example Islam may be quite attractive with its repetitive behaviours and being told what to think and do.

It takes no effort for me to avoid the dark side either. Maybe that's because I've never been a believer, I don't know. The only bit of really stupid irrationality I succumb to is horror films, I can get really freaked out while knowing with every cell of my grey matter that it's just a film. The religiousy ones don't move me at all though, but the likes of Paranormal Activity creeped me out