Choose Your Own Religion
An autistic’s point of view
An autistic person recently left a note in my comments about religion that I found rather interesting. From their perspective, most autistic people start out as believers of faith because of our “trusting” (their word) nature and gradually become so alienated by it that they begin deconstructing their religion as time goes on.
That may be true for some autistic people.
I never had a faith. A religion, yes, but not a faith.
There will be a tie-in to a broader point, I promise. I do value your time, dear reader. But I first need to lay the foundation.
Humanistic Judaism
I grew up in a secular temple. If that sounds like somewhat of an oxymoron, that’s because it is. Humanistic Jews deny any supernatural agency in the world, completely breaking away from the foundation of all the Abrahamic religions. It’s not that Humanistic Jews worship Baal; they worship no supernatural deity. They purposefully place the Torah scroll in the Rabbi’s quarters and outside the sanctuary where you would generally see it — at least my rabbi did. In a humanistic temple, God does not exist. Jews are a cultural group that has survived for thousands of years but that has no bearing on the theology, or lack of it, at a Humanistic Jewish temple. According to our temple, it’s not that “God is dead”; it’s that he never was.
The holocaust was the determining factor in my childhood rabbi’s desire to found a new sect of Judaism that broke away from any theology. Sherwin Wine sympathized with Mordecai Kaplan’s Reconstructionism but wanted to make a clean break from God and go beyond assimilating and adapting to the times we live in. He wanted a new kind of Judaism, and this required the abandonment of a belief in God.
In his mind, humans have always been on their own. If this world comes apart at the seams, it is our fault. It's a relatively straightforward message. Or, as Wine himself liked to say…” If I were a CEO of a company and ran it like God runs the universe, I’d be fired.” Though Wine took inspiration from Spinoza, he never claimed pantheism as his crede. Wine ran in the same circles as Michael Shermer, James Randi, and Richard Dawkins. Hard-core atheism. Say what you want about those three named individuals above, but when you take a look at some of the more well-known Jewish atheists of all time, it is a rather impressive list. For example, I’d love to have Billy Joel’s and Gustav Mahler’s musical genes.
I was about eight or nine the first time I attended services, and I distinctly remember Rabbi Wine lecturing about Albert Einstein. Not about God, but a great Jewish man.
Lived experiences of religion growing up
Side-by-side, I lived in three “Many Worlds,” as Hugh Evertt would say — or three different versions of religious reality. In one world was the public school I attended where, at least in elementary school, I was one of the few Jews who attended — and the only Humanistic Jew. I would hear things at school that would not jive with my understanding from home. Take the Pledge of Allegiance as an example: My family did not believe in God. But I felt compelled to recite His name daily because everyone else did it. And not only was it taken at face value that God existed, but to even question it was blasphemy. This was the world where my babysitter would take me to her Catholic Church quite frequently, and I would take the wafer. I once even told the priest as a four or five-year-old…” You talk well,” which made it hard for him to contain a smile. This was the same world where my classmates’ parents were diehard Reagan supporters because all I had to do was say I supported a Democrat, and I would find out quickly that I was in the minority. “Dukakis is a doofus” is a chant I remember being thrown at me when I expressed support for him — only because my parents did.
In one of the other “worlds” was my extended family. My grandmother feuded with my Dad because he wanted a particular medical procedure for his only newborn son to be done in the hospital and not at someone’s home. My father’s extended family went to shul on the sabbath, kept kosher, and recited from the Torah. Here, God definitely existed. But not quite like the God of public school.
And the last of the three worlds was the secular one I grew up in.
It turns out that being autistic and having this kind of witch’s brew a part of one’s upbringing is the perfect antidote for being culturally conditioned. This does not mean I have everything figured out or that I cannot possibly be a mark for someone with corrupt intent. I almost joined a cult, as I wrote about. I can certainly be someone’s mark. In fact, I think the most intelligent piece of information one can reveal about oneself is that one is vulnerable to being a mark of someone else. This tells me that one is a critical thinker. That person is constantly prodding, probing, and never accepting anything at face value because they know they are not immune to falling under someone’s spell. Anyone who thinks that they cannot fall for a charismatic guru is most susceptible to doing just that. Pride comes before the fall.
But the fact is that I tasted a little bit of everything as a child— like a smorgasbord of offerings. “Try the lox. Try the wine. Try some cheese and pickle sandwiches.” I ate and drank it all.
My perspective
My autistic brain says that this is how parents should raise their children. We should all have the choice to pick our own religion or lack thereof, unlike the name we are given at birth.
Why should we be born into one particular faith? Why shouldn’t it be something that springs forth from within, if it ever springs forth at all?
I have no aspirations of being a parent. But if I were going to be one, I would say when the child is old enough:
“Son or daughter, I hope I am doing a good job showing you how to be decent. I am not perfect, but I do my best. But the values of being kind, loving, and caring are what I most care about and hope to instill in you.”
“As far as whether God exists, no one knows. But everyone is trying to find out. This is your quest and yours alone. If you become a Christian, I will love you as a Christian. If you become a Hindu, I will love you as a Hindu. Or a Jew. Or a Muslim. Or an atheist. Or a Wiccan. Or a Shaman. Or a Buddhist. Or a Mormon. All the same to me. Just don’t ever lose that spark of love that rests within you.”
My parents never actually said these things to me growing up, but this is the message I took away from my upbringing, especially from my Dad.
You may ask…”What if my child becomes a Scientologist?” It means you gave them the autonomy to make that choice. Nothing more. They may become one anyway, whether you like it or not.
Perhaps it’s both from a combination of my upbringing and my autism, but I do view most religions with great suspicion. The faith and joy they give people are undeniable, and they deserve praise for their humanitarian work worldwide. I would never want to take away people’s religion. Unlike Karl Marx, I do not necessarily subscribe to the belief that religion is an opiate of the masses.
But when you get down to the nitty-gritty and ponder what you believe about the nature of the world, you most likely inherited this from your family. And religious dominance and control create conditions for tribal warfare. Religion does not cause most wars; the fight for land does. After all, we need only look at Mao and Stalin for those who committed atheist brutality. But it does account for almost 6.87% of all wars in human history. This means millions and millions of people in history still died because of religious wars.
What if? What if we could stake our own claims to what we believe?
How much less personal guilt would people feel in their own lives? How much less superiority would there be if everyone was offered a choice? How much less tribalism would be dominating the news every day?
Buddhism is the most attractive worldview to me as of the present moment. As I have had no belief system to ‘cling to’ in the first place growing up and through adulthood, I find clinging to something I don’t know as a fact a very foreign experience. Just as the visible universe is only 5% observable, and 95% consists of what we cannot see, it takes a lot of grit and spunk to say we mere mortals know how the vast universe works. But that is my peculiar way of seeing the world.
Are there things that have happened that are unexplainable? Sure. Take Our Lady of Fátima. I believe people experienced something there that day, en masse. The shepherd children received a message from who they thought to be the Virgin Mary, foretelling this event would take place. But how do we know that an advanced AI or an extraterrestrial civilization did not have the technology to produce such an event? Why would they do it if ETs even existed in the first place? (I am not saying I believe in ETs.) Well, that’s another question entirely, and I cannot pretend to have an answer. But when something unexplainable happens, one should always hold open to the possibility that there can be other explanations than what seems obvious. The fact is that every religion claims miracles. The autobiography of Yogananda is filled with gurus performing miracles. Sathya Sai Baba is said to have been a walking miracle machine, whether he was or wasn’t. Miracles also happen in some Native American traditions.
What I like about my belief system is that it does not box me into a corner, at least for the moment. If I read enough scripture and decide I have the faith of a mustard seed, I might become a Christian one day. If I aim to escape the cycle of births and rebirths as a soul and want to feel a personal relationship with various deities, I might choose Hinduism. But suppose I no longer feel I am an individual soul and am steadying myself towards enlightenment without clinging along with everything else in creation. In that case, I may stay in my lane — which, for the moment, is where I am. While I do not officially say I am a Buddhist, it resonates with me more than anything else does at the moment.
The devil’s advocate
There are, of course, downsides to my proposal of choosing one’s own religion for autistic people. Autistic individuals need a sense of community to thrive, and if you are born into a religion, it does provide that. Many people say we are “literal,” and as one research article says, autistic people may take religious texts quite literally. As the article says:
Acceptance and inclusion within these communities can benefit those who may feel marginalized in other social contexts. Religion can serve as a coping mechanism, providing comfort and a structured framework to navigate life’s difficulties. Moreover, religious practices may help with emotional regulation and provide a sense of stability. Therefore, inclusive religious communities should try to accommodate the needs of individuals with autism by giving sensory-friendly environments, adapted rituals, and educational materials
That is no doubt true.
However interestingly enough, while the authors of the same article are careful to deny causation between “theory of mind” (ugh!) (ToM) and belief in the supernatural, they believe ToM may enable some supernatural beliefs. Why? Because, I guess, we can empathize with the supernatural agents in the universe that exist? I find this downright bizarre. For example, if I do not believe in Santa Claus, does that mean I lack ToM regarding Santa’s phenomenology?
So then the authors come to these conclusions based on the work of another researcher:
1. Social cognition content bias hypothesis: natural ToM operations are central in religious representations of intentional agents with counterintuitive properties (e.g., ghosts passing the wall, angels that never die, gods present everywhere simultaneously), cognitive appeal, and their intuitive inferential potential.
2. Impaired religious understanding hypothesis: deficits in ToM in ASD substantially limit intuitive understanding and inferences from religious representations about intentional agents with counterintuitive properties.
3. Mindblind atheism hypothesis: limitations on intuitive religious understanding and inference in ASD decrease the probability that they will be religious and increase the likelihood that they will be atheists
But hey, at least the authors surmise that St. Francis of Assisi was probably on the spectrum.
As to their three points, I do not believe my lack of rootedness in anything firm is that I am “mind-blind.” Instead, I think it is because I have an open mind. I remain open to being convinced by anything that comes my way. Being open to taking a new path at any given moment is part of what makes life adventurous for me. If that means that I am “mind-blind,” then so be it.
