Free The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life by Jesse Bering Page A

religious faith, I guess I could say, is not a gift from God, as so many people say; it is a gift I gave to myself. In line with this, I have never felt the emotional exhilaration that people must feel when they have a “religious experience.” This is true even when I receive the sacraments. The only thing that has deeply moved me is the reasonableness of it all. 12
     
    We can’t help but get the distinct impression from such descriptions that theism in autistic people is somehow different from the garden-variety version. It’s not that autistic religion isn’t theologically sophisticated. On the contrary, these writers’ religious views are extraordinary. When I met with Schneider at a public library to discuss his beliefs with him in person, he had a colossal, self-published tome tucked under his arm, a document riddled with complicated mathematical formulas, which he was convinced showed clearly how God was busy at work in the quantum universe. (It may well have been just what he said it was. But given my own shameful impoverishments in the subject of physics, the document was almost entirely incomprehensible to me.)
    Yet at least in the autobiographies of autistic individuals, God, the cornerstone of most people’s religious experience, is presented more as a sort of principle than as a psychological entity. For autistics, God seems to be a faceless force in the universe that is directly responsible for the organization of cosmic structure—arranging matter in an orderly fashion, or “treating” entropy—or He’s been reduced to cold, rational scientific logic altogether. To Schneider, instead of the emotional correlates of church ritual that so often engender the physiology of spiritual awakenings (what University of Oxford anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse calls “sensory pageantry”), 13 Catholicism is more an anxiety-reducing medium with its formal, predictable procedures and the clarity of its canons. It gives almost step-by-step instructions, telling the autistic how to behave in a very threatening, confusing social world and affording them some degree of control.
    What is noticeably missing in the preceding accounts is a sense of interpersonal relations between the autistic individual and God. It’s almost as if the algorithmic strategies used to deal with other people—such as the lady at the ATM machine—spill over into the authors’ religious beliefs as well. Rather than an emotional dependence or rich social relationship with God, deductive logic is used to lay the groundwork for understanding existence and to impose order on a chaotic world. The sense of the numinous , or spiritual “otherness,” inherent in most people’s religious beliefs is conspicuously absent in the autistic.
    All this is to say that, for autistics, God may be a behavioral rather than a psychological agent. If this is indeed the case, then people with autism should be less inclined to see natural events as carrying some type of subtle, hidden message. For example, a lonely, single man with autism might pray for a wife but will not be able to decode the symbolic device—a natural event—by which God “responds,” such as a female friend’s husband leaving her for another woman. A nonautistic, religious observer might interpret this to be God’s “wanting” the man to be with this female friend, and thus view God as having intentionally set up this chain of social events as a way to respond to the man’s prayer; yet, because of his theory-of-mind impairments, the autistic man wouldn’t easily infer God’s intentions in this episode. Indeed, one man with Asperger’s syndrome inquired on an Internet bulletin board whether others with the disorder were like him, “conscious of no feedback from the divine.” If God communicates in the subtle language of natural events, it’s no wonder that people on the autistic spectrum would so often fail to pick up on His communicative messages.
     
     
    On the other side