SOME AUTISTIC PEOPLE AND MORAL AND RELIGIOUS RESPONSIBILITY 

Autistic people find it hard and sometimes impossible to connect their actions and intentions to moral responsibility. They might feel they have acted immorally when they did not mean to. They take mistakes for deliberate acts of evil. Or they can intend harm to somebody without acting or doing anything and feel they have done something terrible if say that person dies in an accident. They might worry more about having had a dark fantasy about killing somebody than actually killing somebody. Anyway there is a disconnect between how they should perceive culpability and how they do.

Autism does that to you. It also makes you see others as evil for erring.  It causes you to blame them if somebody dies or suffers if they have a dark wish, if they wish harm on that somebody.  Even though they don't act on their wish, as long as harm follows you blame them. There is no perception that correlation is not causation.

This is why we should not be enrolling children in religions with silly moral rules such as missing mass on a Sunday being a sin or masturbation being evil.

That is why we should not be inspiring them to adhere to the idea of a good God.  The next step is to blame suffering and harm on human evil.  Nobody is evil.  It's mistakes not evil.

That is why Jesus with his claim that nobody is good but God, and that people are evil and that the wicked need eternal punishment needs to be booted out of everybody's childhood.

People with autism feel they do not fit in with others and this in itself easily leads to discomfort with their bodies and aspects of their bodies. Many autistic people have an out of body feeling, a feeling of not belonging, and the dualist message of religion can harm them further.  Self-harm can happen to people who feel they are in their bodies but that their bodies are not them.  Religion and teachers of religion and parents must ask how responsible their faith is for harming autistic people especially children.

People with autism feel that there is no group they can fit into or belong in. Even things like telling an autistic person to put away the book and get ready to go to Church can cause intense distress. They hate such changes. Naturally if you fear change you will fear the authority or person who asks you to make the change. The mere request is seen as threatening commandment.  The Bible with its threats against sinners and so on is harmful to autistic people.

It is vital that autistic children be better protected from religious teachers, religious parents and clergy and other preachers of faith.