Why I’m Not a Heathen: Most Aspies are Atheists so Why am I not?

Most aspies are atheists and this is attributed to our logical and rational worldview. Yet, I would counter that the reason most aspies don’t believe in God is more a matter of disposition than logic. As it says in my info, I am of the minority of aspies that is extroverted and while I do have technical interests, they are the technicalities of psychology and the social sciences rather than STEM. God exists within the paradigm of morality and inanimate things lack moral agency. Furthermore, things spiritual are in the paradigm of true beauty and beauty is most obviously seen in the realm of morality such as in the pictures in the “Love” page in this website where the Christmas Truce of 1914, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Cellist of Sarajevo’s pictures are posted with captions.

I am not an atheist despite my Asperger’s because my life has been spent studying the human condition and it is the human condition that is the clearest window into the ethereal truths which constitute the elements of the metaphysical and purely abstract paradigms. If one looks through a telescope or a microscope one may see things very pretty but immense beauty is only seen through studying subjects like politics and history. My faith in humanity is all but absent and I believe humans are almost pure evil to the cores of their beings. Almost. The goodness in humanity is just under a fifth the volume of a quark. Yet, that incomprehensibly miniscule iota of goodness is enough to give me faith in God, if almost none in humanity.

The goodness in humanity is the single candlelight in an almost infinite void of darkness. While the darkness is almost infinite, darkness is a lack of light, it is the absence of photons, and is not the presence of anything and therefore a single candlelight is infinitely brighter than a darkness a trillion parsecs in diameter. That’s not a hyperbole and is about the ratio of good to bad in humanity. Yet, that ratio makes the light even more amazing. In such a depraved and wretched species, it is truly spectacular and breathtaking to see moral beauty persist despite the medium it must persist in. That despite power of the demons of humanity who succeed in taking most souls, that very occasionally they lose and the angels win. Those disparate and sparse victories are so awing that they outweigh all defeats.

I cannot look at the scenes of beauty posted on that page and elsewhere in the world and deny the objectivity, not only of morality, but moral beauty, and it is that objectivity of moral beauty where my belief in God first begins. Yet, my religion only has a moderate relationship with my theism. My religion is partially divorced from my spiritual beliefs. I am deeply romantic and a theatrical set of rituals replete with magic, costumes, invisible people, invisible realms, epic stories, and the rest is as much play for me as it is real. I believe in the religion I profess but my belief is not most of my religion. I do my earnest religion out in the world being the best person I can be, church is for playing magic.

I believe in God and in the veracity of the scriptures of my religion summarized so well the Nicene Creed but even if not, I would still practice religion because I deeply love the aura of the psychologically harrowing and deep emotions and thoughts of the concern with the eternal combined with the pageantry and ritual of practicing magic. Atheists make fun of us for believing in a fairy tale and my response is that I want to live in a fairy tale. If I didn’t believe in it, I would pretend to believe in it and still practice it since I am just that hardcore of a romantic. My fantasies are vintage and set in classic Western culture ergo Christianity is a must, and a devout Christianity at that.

Which is to say that I am religious because I could not be irreligious. My dispositions both of my academic and scientific interests and my emotional and romantic interests led to the place where I had to have a religion. Most aspies lack the interests in humans and lack the romantic emotions that made me a devotee of the divine. Whether or not someone is religious has as much to do with their orientation toward particular fields as it does with any level of logic or rationality. Had I gone into STEM and I lacked my embellished and gilded tastes in aesthetics and atmosphere, there is a chance I would be an atheist. It is a matter of whether one is looking in a place where God may be seen and a matter if one enjoys the theater and histrionic emotion that comes with a belief in magic and magical ritual.

That is why I am religious while most of my co-deviants aren’t. This does not explain why every religious aspie is religious. There are many STEM-oriented aspies who are believers and a number of human-oriented aspies who are not. There are many routes to belief and disbelief. Yet, I believe mine is one of the more common and representative reasons why smart, logical, people are religious. So long as one is not merely inheriting beliefs from one’s family, it is not a matter of intelligence and the ability to reason. I was an atheist for a few years and then I became spiritual-but-not-religious and then converted back to my home religion. It was a conscious choice made through rational deduction but one made because I made that deduction from information gathered through the studies most of my co-deviants don’t do and pushed by emotions many of them have more weakly and fewer of.