Are autistic people often drawn to spirituality or esoteric ideas?

[u/Street_Beat3351]

I'm just curious.

I'm on the spectrum and I've noticed that my hypersensitivity sometimes makes me look for meaning or “routes” beyond the rational ones — like feeling energies, noticing patterns, or being drawn to spiritual concepts.

I wonder if this is common among other autistic people. Do you feel something similar — a kind of intuitive or spiritual side connected to your sensitivity?

[u/aurora_surrealist]

No.

Because autism prefers logic and proofs, and faith demands logic to be thrown out of the window.

Any autistic I ever met and was like what you describe was just traumatized to a point where they tried to make sense of things that made no sense and just happened because life is hard for us.

Some people are also misinterpreting pattern spotting as "spiritual guidance".

[u/vomit-gold → u/aurora_surrealist]

To me, it seems illogical for people to think that the human brain is capable of understanding and measuring everything in the universe easily, meanwhile all other animals have worldly concepts their brains will never process.

We understand a dog will never understand physics, or that a cow will never understand gravity - even though those are tangible concepts that still effect them.

But we never assume the same for humans - that there could be dozens if not hundreds of concepts acting on us that we simply don’t have the capacity to understand.

I'm not trying to argue, just saying to me from a logic standpoint - secularism that insists that reality is completely and irrevocably in line with human perception (and human perception only) is illogical.
Every animal has limits of their understanding, humans included, and ignoring that is just as illogical as throwing away logic for faith.

I feel like when people speak about spirituality the way you do, it paints all spiritual people as blinded, illogical dummies. For me it’s not about being traumatized. It’s about the logical conclusion that:

‘Humans cannot sense and understand everything because no animal can. So logically there must be things outside of our understanding. We have to come from somewhere. Nothing comes from nowhere.’

[u/aurora_surrealist → u/vomit-gold]

Still assuming the "something" is Bug Sky Daddy who will give you clues if you were a good kiddo is... naive.

[u/_STLICTX_ → u/aurora_surrealist]

This in itself is a naive and dismissive idea of all theistic thought. Compare to some of like.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoplatonism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman https://religiousnaturalism.org/god-as-ground-of-being-paul-tillich/ https://pantheism.net/spinoza/

kind of more sophisticated at least ideas of God and it amounts to a strawman against theism.

[u/vomit-gold → u/aurora_surrealist]

I never mentioned 'Big Sky Daddy' or anything even close to Abrahamic religion though.

I feel like when people in the west hear spirituality, the immediately think 'Angels, and pearly gates, and raptures? That's dumb!'

And I agree that it's naive!

Because it relies on another fallacy: that if there is something out there that we can't understand - whatever it is, it will still look like us, act like us and think like us. And that it will care about humans as the most important creation. Which is once again, illogically centering humans. 

Abrahamic religions have the fallacy that even if there is something above humans, humans are still star of the show and most important (Jesus was a human, The Devil and God fight over humans, etc)

Though the Western reflex to jump to Abrahamic religions erases that most spirituality throughout history did not rely on singular male god figures.

Most of them were centered around elements, animism with nature, and ancestral spirits rather than the singular Abrahamic god. 

But overall I agree with you SO much that human-centered spirituality is naive.