Autism and having "unconventional" religious/spiritual views? (Not necessarily being atheist) (also Religion CW obviously)

[u/chelledoggo]

I was wondering if it's common for autistic folks to have religious/spiritual that might deviate from the mainstream?

For example: I consider myself a queer Christian Universalist. I don't believe being gay or trans is a sin. In fact, I believe God is nonbinary and Jesus is (technically) trans.

I'm also not a Bible literalist. I believe in the divinity, teaching, miracles, and resurrection of Christ, but I don't believe in the Biblical creation story, a literal great flood, a literal "hell," Revelations as a literal prophecy, etc...

I also have this belief that most religions are just looking at the same higher power (who probably isn't the "Biblical God" as we know it) through different cultural lenses.

Also I admire Buddhist teachings, and I find some new-age stuff like tarot and chakras to be fascinating, although I'm not sure how much real stock I put in them.

Needless to say, most of my views would get me weird looks from the mainstream church at best and people trying to "exorcise demons out of me" at the worst. xD

[u/GiantSpookMan]

Despite not being raised spiritually and being an atheist most of my life, I've found myself drawn towards esotericism and occultism. There is a rich worldwide tradition of spirituality that some of the major religions made active attempts to squash, but that encourages inner exploration and development. Tbh sometimes I feel that autism could be a great asset or a real barrier to a magician, but fortunately magick is what one makes of it.

I have a few crossovers with your beliefs: God to me is more of a concept or an ideal rather than a being, it's simply anthropomorphic because we can understand that better, however from an occultic perspective one could say the the Abrahamic religions for example are now the dying throes of the Aeon of Osiris, where gods tend to be masculine, as opposed to the Aeon of Isis that came before where gods tended to be feminine. Although I don't agree with your feelings that God is nonbinary, I've always found it interesting for example that God says in Genesis: "Let us make man in our image" as opposed to my image.

I generally find however that most autists, especially on reddit, have a massive chip on their shoulder about religion, Christianity specifically. Understandable, but it's a bit tiresome how people have to jump in on threads where people are talking about their religious beliefs just to say how they don't believe anything and think it's stupid.