Christianity and my Autism

Playing games of imagination has always been an essential part of my nature. It is easy to dismiss pretending as a childish activity. It is not just the autistic adult, however, who plays such games. Rather, adults of all walks of life set up elaborate games of pretend called religions and indulge in those all the time.

In their book “The Bondage Breaker,” Neil Anderson and Dave Park list several items which are counter to Christianity. Everything from imaginary friends to Buddhism and even certain movies are deemed “counterfeit to Christianity.” (Neil Anderson and Dave Park. “The Bondage Breaker: Youth Edition” Eugene: Harvest House Publishers, 1993. p. 189ff). With my earlier discussion of creativity and fantasy in mind, it is easy to understand why someone who postulates the reality of his fantasy would then want to condemn all other fantasies.

Fantasy and imagination, being outpourings of creativity are naturally arbitrary and individualistic. When one tries to portray one's fantasies as real one must face the risk that she will encounter something contrary to the fundamental tenets of those fantasies. We see several examples of reactions to such encounters in the form of young earth creationism and fundamentalism in general. In Anderson and Park's case, the antithesis to their imaginings happens to be the existence of other imaginings – and quite naturally so for how can one assert the reality of one imagining over another when both imaginings happen to stem from the workings of humans? More generally, the fundamentalist Muslim beating an unveiled woman beats her for the same reason that a paranoid pseudo-scientist in the United States rails against the theory of evolution and tries to portray it as being in league with the Devil. Both of these men are trying to fight back the intrusion of reality into a fantastical world that should have been left in the realm of individual experience. In the case of the Muslim the reality is that women, being human agents, are quite capable of effecting their own actions and the consequences of those actions. In the case of the creationist, modern science has discredited his bronze-age text's assertions concerning how the universe came into being.

In 1995 I read Anderson and Park's list of prohibited fascinations for the first time as I grew into a fundamentalist Christian. It was that list and others like it that weighed heavily on my mind as I researched Zen and Taoism in 2007, bothering me immensely. It was those lists that resulted ultimately in my turning to atheism (or perhaps I should say ceasing to believe in the Christian God). Christianity is the destruction of whatever Jesus might have stood for (and I do not think we will ever know) in favour of lists of banned ideas, thoughts, activities, and lifestyles. It is a fascism of the mind, where creativity and originality are attributable solely to God (C. S. Lewis. “Christianity and Literature” in “Christian Reflections.” London: HarperCollins, 1980. p. 8).

Because Christianity is incredibly restrictive in what kinds of spiritual exploration are permitted under the so-called freedom of Christ I simply could not live with it any longer. In an era of rapid change the necessity for adaptability out-stripped the utility of Christianity. This is especially true in a life like mine, gripped by autism and its obsession with regularity and order. It was in the ideas of Taoist philosophy that I began to see a more practical way of carrying myself in life, and more importantly a philosophy that piqued my interest. Why not explore something that fascinates me in order to step out into the real world of disorder and chaos (William Stillman. “The Soul of Autism.” Franklin Lakes: Career Press, 2008.
p. 46)? Taoism then, with its emphasis on the tao, something which cannot be named or understood, was to me a perfect expression of the chaos of the real world. Any systematic understanding of the world begins to fall apart when it is actually applied to the world. To be sure, a system might work well for decades, even centuries, but there will inevitably come a time when it will need to be replaced because the world it encompasses (or pretends to encompass) will no longer fit into the pattern of that system. Ultimately, during all the years that I was a Christian, functionalism served as the key to allowing me to side-step the fundamentalism of Christianity in favour of the creativity afforded by autism.

Autism for me allows for atheism to have purpose. It is easy to assert that in a world without God life ceases to have purpose. But in the world of my autism life already has no purpose. Instead, the majority of the people whom I encounter in life in life are concerned with more practical and dare I say mundane things than the things which which I am concerned. This leaves me ultimately alone and without meaning in the world. Thus, I must create my own meaning and purpose out of the world as I experience it. I must assert his own destiny because the only telos offered by the external world is one which I either do not understand or one which I consider too monotonous to be worth my time.