A new study appeared recently that looks to initially show that atheism is linked with Asperger’s syndrome, a type of high-functioning autism. I've seen Vox Day boast on his blog about how his observations have been proven correct after four years but his boasting is unwarranted.
After looking at a few write ups on the subject it's clear what's going on.
It's not as if atheism causes one to become autistic or that most people who are atheists are autistic. It's actually the other way around. Most people who are autistic are atheists. This is because those who are autistic lack the capabilities to socialize as well as other individuals and cannot understand what others are thinking or feeling, and therefore, this causes their social skills to become stunted. If real-life social interaction is this difficult for them why in the world would they believe in imaginary friends to communicate with?!
I've always felt that this ad hominem was ridiculous. I even took an online test for Asperger’s and my results came back normal. This is just a pointless and false attack upon atheists at large. I also find it demeaning towards people afflicted with Asperger’s as they are essentially being insulted by Vox with his use of their unfortunate condition as some kind of a slur against a group of people.
LOL, it's obvious to any autistic person that you're not autistic, since you clearly exhibit anti-teleological thinking, rather than a-teleological thinking like autistic people. I posted something about this at my blog last summer.
ReplyDeleteI consider the link between autism and atheism to be a compliment to atheists, and I am mildly autistic myself. I would prefer both Christians and atheists who are mildly autistic, since then we could dispense with the 99% of discussion that is just rank stupidity.
I totally agree that if there is any causation related to an atheism-Asperger's correlation, it is definitely in the Asperger's to atheism direction.
ReplyDeleteI took the AQ test shortly after watching the movie 'Adam' and seeing some striking similarities between the protagonist and myself. I just took it again to see if the scoring is consistent. Both times I ended up with a score of 32. That being said, I really don't think that I have Asperger's.... I just have some very strong Asperger's-like tendencies; and those tend to contribute to how I view the world and therefore contribute to my atheism.