Are autistic/ASD people more likely to be atheist?

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Well yes, any additional disorder involving delusions could make the person concerned rather open to religious belief, indeed atheists have been known to suggest that religion is a form of (group) psychosis. In my case, when it comes to cognitive belief, disbelief, and "construals," I tend to avoid anything that's not logical or evidence-based, and that trait is so strong in me that I've come to strongly suspect that it's protected me from psychosis, or "losing my reason" as it's sometimes called.

There are some ASD traits that are thought to push us towards religion - we often like order and rigidity, and our problem of tending to become isolated, if it makes us lonely, could attract us to a socially-welcoming church, which I guess many churches are. In my case I don't think my attachment to rigid order or my desire to ease my loneliness are strong enough to overcome my insistence on things making logical sense to me and passing empirical tests of veracity.

Sounds to me like for some of us on the spectrum we can potentially be prone to being culturally religious, or we might simply become prone to cult-like behavior seeking something that the real world around us fails to give us.

I'm very strongly atheistic. I am absolutely certain that no supernatural phenomena are real. I think it's because I tend to be very rational and am not persuaded by any pressure to follow the crowd. I would think that this is an autistic trait.

I was raised Catholic and went to church as a kid, but my family was not particularly religious, and I think my father was an atheist, although it's not something we ever discussed. I think I was about 12 or 13 when I realized it was all nonsense.

Although I would not go that far in saying all religious people are insane. That's pretty harsh. What exactly defines sanity anyways?

Honestly I think our rigid thinking tendencies would lend themselves well to religious views

My atheism is only very slightly less absolute than yours. Strangely enough the difference is down to my being such a rigid stickler for rational thinking - strict logic informs me that it's impossible to disprove the existence of a deity, ghost, or other supposed supernatural phenomenon, therefore I can't be absolutely certain there's no truth in any of it. In practice it makes no appreciable difference. Some things appear to be so improbable that it's hardly reasonable to hang about waiting for them to happen. If we paid undue attention to highly unlikely events, we'd never get anything else done.


Yes, "insane" is a word that gets bandied around without much clarity on exactly what it means. "Sane" comes from the Latin word sanus, meaning healthy. Religion usually has healthy and unhealthy attributes.

I think the notion that religion is insane is referring mostly to its delusional aspect - the strong belief that something exists when there's no hard evidence that it does. Although it's true that some harmful human mental states are characterised by delusions, it doesn't follow that all delusions are 100% harmful, and that includes religion. One priest will torture a child to death to remove a supposed evil spirit, while another will run a food bank for the poor.

What makes me feel certain is that while I think it's likely that there are things that exist that humans know nothing about and wouldn't be able to understand (in the same way that cats are not aware of physics), what I find so improbable as to feel certain that it's impossible is that the fairy tales that humans invented could be the actual explanations of unknown phenomena.

^
Exactly - "so improbable as to feel certain that it's impossible" is what most of us do for the sake of efficiency. My way is to keep the door very slightly open to doubt, which can be useful when a religionist argues with me, as otherwise they might accuse me of having faith in atheism, and therefore being hypocritical or irrational because I dismiss cognitive faith as a mistake.