What religion are you?

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I’m glad you had that community support.

Thank you.
They saved my life, really.
They showed me there was still kindness and charity in the world.

I wasn't even active in my church at the time.
The Bishop barely knew me, but she rallied to help me in whatever way she could.

I'm still trying to pay it forward.
Next week it will be 13 years.

There is also a major risk & conflict of interest if the religious counselors are counseling people who were harmed by their church, like counseling alter-boys that others in the church molested. I've heard of that happening before. I'm not sure if that's true but it would NOT surprise me that a church or other organization would want to cover that kinda thing up by dealing with it internally.

I am an irreligious atheist. I do not see any reason to believe in any deities. I was raised Christian, but despite trying my best I never found any reason to believe in God and I never enjoyed church at all. My parents stopped going to church themselves (but are still believers) in my later teens fortunately. The forcing of or pressuring to go to church then went away and hasn't ever come back. I'm so glad for that. I took that opportunity to happily remove myself from the religion entirely.

I am non-institutional church of Christ.I also joined the church of the Latter Day Dude as a Dudeist Priest as a joke and so I could perform weddings.I am also part of the Universal Life Church/Universal Life Church Monastery.

I don't have one.

Protestant. Baptist in theology but am now exploring other areas.

Atheist.

animist

I was an atheist for many years, but after I moved out of the city and to an area that had better access to nature I started feeling this “energy” from the forest. It’s hard to explain

The feeling was pretty strong so I decided to lean in to it, so long as it didn’t detract from the things I needed to do in life / cause harm.

I studied (and am still studying) Taoism, Shinto, Buddhism, and Wicca, and kind of formulated a loose “practice” based on them.

My mental health has improved significantly, I spend much more time outdoors, and my diet is improved as I am now more thoughtful about the source of my food and what I cook.

Overall it’s been a very positive change for me and I’m planning on sticking with it for the long haul.

^That sounds really nice.

I'm an atheist myself. For a short while I belonged to a Unitarian Church but you can be atheist and Unitarian.

It's interesting that atheists and agnostics make up a full 50% of respondents, which is much higher than the general population, at least in the US (not sure of the geographic makeup of the responses on this poll). Are spectrumites more likely to be atheist?

I would say yes, mainly because of two things:

* The religious options made available to them are not convincing or contain doctrines / ideas that they strongly disagree with.

* They don’t fit in with the local church / their church experience was awful, which caused them to separate from the church. With no convincing alternatives, many become agnostic or atheist.

It literally took a kind of spiritual experience / awakening to convince me that there’s more out there than what meets the eye. I feel that’s basically the level of convincing it would take for most people with ASD, and probably most atheists / agnostics in general.

The double-empathy problem is a big player here too IMO. It’s very difficult to be a part of a congregation that literally can not relate to you or your spiritual needs.

Speaking of spiritual needs, I think that the spiritual needs of those with ASD are different than for NTs. This is 100% anecdotal, but I have noticed more people with ASD traits among Pagans/animists than with followers of Abrahamic religions.

I feel that people with ASD are more orthoprax than orthodox and I suspect this is a big source of friction. I’d love to see a study on this.

I have a very, very involved experience with religion and I'm working on writing something much larger about it. It would take a book to explain all of the reasons why I'm now an atheist.

Basically, I was a United Methodist, majored in theology in college, went into youth ministry. Had very post-modern religious views that a lot of people outside of the academic world of theology didn't understand or thought were atheistic. Didn't share those views at all. Was constantly getting in trouble for being an ally to queer and trans kids, even though there were queer and trans kids IN my youth groups. Was told to ask a student to start acting "less gay" for example. In 2020, I was finally working somewhere with queer kids and families, but I was getting in trouble because I wouldn't hold large in-person events. I had such horrible experiences with my supervisors and coworkers that I left and will never look back. There were lovely people hidden in all of the churches I worked at, but being on staff made me see how horrific and unhealthy things usually were behind the scenes, and because I've seen too much, I can't walk into a church without becoming angry.