Is your AS/ASD a gift from God?

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As far as theology is concerned, I don't consider myself as being aligned with any particular group/denomination, however the ideas and practices of certain religions are still intriguing from an intellectual and philosophical standpoint for me.

The idea, for example, of God gifting or testing induviduals and the different ways that christians, and members of other religions make sense of this idea brings up an interesting question:

Do you consider your AS/ASD to be a gift from, or a test by, God? If so, why?

First I don't think I understand God's will. I look at the brutality of evolution, ask whether it could have been a different way, ask myself then to what end result, and I realize I have no clue what I'm talking about if I go down that track.

I would argue that evolution is constantly spraying the canvas with different kinds of forms, and some of those forms perhaps do have a purpose if for no other reason than how they align with and affect their environments. I think inadvertently, pulling on the bible again, if the Jeremiah and Isaiah types and I think - it really had to suck to be them, ie. in certain senses they were what a particular culture needed at a particular time but - like any addict worth their salt - the cultures they criticized were doubling down on their mistakes, doubling-down on their fervence to keep up with their view of the world, and equally doubling down on the punishment for any varying or different opinion - quadrupling down on any direct criticism to the way things were headed.

In certain ways I do think there are a fair amount of us who, for perhaps no better moral reason than survival, have to be first-principles rationalists and in some ways that's made us, our thoughts, and our words something like the remedy to the evolutionary siren-song of tribalism, which is the sort of thing which is quite likely to usher in the end of Dr. Strangelove if it sticks around with our technological advancements.

This is where I think the question is worth considering - ie. if we have a deeper aspect of ourselves (think Iain McGilchrist's Master and Emissary) that handles the more abstract and long-term concerns of life, if each of our deeper selves have a way of conversing like tree root systems, whether 'supernatural' or nonverbal (which I do believe at least one, the other, or both to to be correct), then there's a whole network of causation that we rarely think about. I side with Bret Weinstein in that I'd agree that society serves the genome, not the other way around. However, there are times where the genome itself has to make sacrifices if it wants to move into the future. If our technologies could lead us to radioactively Dutch-ovening the planet and making a sort of Book of Eli scenario that's bad for the genome. Tribalism * superweapons = very few humans, those remaining a bit like the Hills Have Eyes troupe; all of that - very bad for the genome.

I think that's where we, and other forms of genetic intelligentsia taking the reigns of life, has something to do with now increasingly understood limitations as to where humanity can go without self-annihilation. If we get absolutely pillaried for honesty, treated like we're genetically inferior or like our honesty means we're low on the hierarchy (which general honesty - in the past - has been a side-effect of) and need to lick boots for the rest of our lives for being different, ergo weak, there's a growing understanding that tribal warfare and a societal reproduction circuit run on the most arbitrary shibboleths will be the death of the future and the death of the human race.

All of that could be the kinds of conversation that the human tree-roots are having, and maybe that's why the political struggles these days have taken on a particularly Jungian flavor in that college campuses have become something like tribal fetishes and are becoming increasingly less academic. I try to think of each confrontation that society collectively has, whether intellectually, emotionally, or subconsciously, as some distinct layer of self-aware being seeing itself in the mirror and either acknowledging or recoiling and reseeding into deeper self-deception.

Whatever the case I think the side of acknowledgement and integrity is slowly winning, maybe a little too slowly for comfort. Also it's never fun to be either a spiritual or genetic Jeremiah and Isaiah because you will get pilloried, and that's been precisely the life experience of most aspies - ie. living with their heads and hands in the stocks.

A gift or a test? Eh...not very adequate choices here, sorry.

Depends on how you look at it. I'd LIKE to more easily navigate the NT world. But on the other hand I'm exceptionally good at one thing and creative. Would giving up my flaws mean giving up my gifts as well?

I also don't believe that God "tests" anyone in that way. God knows everything, including all the future choices you'll ever make or COULD ever make. So God has no need to test you. "Tests" are really for revealing who YOU are and who God is in relation to you. Tests are only necessary in helping you evaluate where you are in your spiritual life and understand where your opportunities for growth are. You don't even really NEED to be tested if you don't want to be, but without trials you don't really move forward spiritually. I think that's why you have such a wide variance in behavior between, say, teenagers at the beginning of their spiritual journey and the elderly who, for all practical purposes seem to be just marking time.

In terms of a disorder, though, it's just an unfortunate result of being born into a fallen creation. You won't find a single person who isn't broken or challenged in some way. Aspie, NT, doesn't matter. Whether you lied and told your gf her shoes look nice when they don't or you're on death row for mass murder, you are broken. Even if you've never done ANYTHING wrong, you're at high risk for self-righteousness. It's an ongoing thing and a curse. But it also reveals how rich our lives are as believers because we have that story. AS, capital crimes, hypocrisy, pride, selfishness and greed--we all have our obstacles to overcome that we are powerless for without total reliance on God. Rich or poor, when it was all over with, did God raise you above yourself and your nature? No matter the challenge or deficiency or whatever, each life is a testimony to God's power.

I think that's something of a homage to our compartmentalization.

I've realized, watching myself get older, just how uneven my maturation has been as there have been parts of me that have grown up super-fast and parts of me that I myself couldn't have kicked to death in order to change them, until some seemingly random or arbitrary thing came up which somehow made those previously inaccessible things then accessible. Strange how that works.

I don't think I would say that my ASD is a gift from God----but, I feel my coping mechanism / strength to keep on keepin'-on, IS.

I say neither, but I am not voting. The neither option in the poll is to narrow. I could say neither and be religious.

It's a gift from nature via the processes of genetic mutation and natural selection.

It’s a punishment

Neither gift nor test, just a genetic roll of the dice.

I believe there must be an evolutionary benefit to having a few autistic traits in the gene pool, for autism to remain with us (even when so many autistics don't have kids). Though it is hard to see what that benefit might be, sometimes.

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This

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This

I'm fairly certain that AS is a gift from Kek.

If God exists, and he's not a sadistic psychopath, then it's an exercise.
If God exists, and he's sadist or psychopath, then it's a (cruel) joke.
If God doesn't exist, then who cares?

It's an arbitrary act of nature via the processes of genetic mutation and natural selection.
No imaginary friends were involved.

You took the words right from my mouth, figuratively!

Unlikely, mostly because it's highly unlikely that one or more gods exist or have existed.