The point being that there is a region where the differences are pretty blurry. There’s no problem distinguishing Pat Robinson from Richard Dawkins but not everyone is that easy.

“I don’t think that research is all that strong.”
“How anti-social of you!”

@35: Oh yeah, I love a good Christmas service and you can pry away my Beethoven, Bach, and Pärt off of my mp3 player when I’m dead. But, as much as I’m a jolly participant in interfaith/transfaith communities, people seem to say the silliest things about atheists on a regular basis. Here, I think the social cognition model is a silly thing about both atheist and religious philosophy, but so it goes.

@37: Again, you have to deal with the fact that many forms of religion do not envision God as another mind, while you have scores of atheists who describe having very similar forms of transcendental experience as theists. Somewhat ironically here, I’m raising the same criticism of the social cognition model that religious people have been making about Dawkins and Hitchins for years: it’s based on an oversimplification of religious philosophy and psychology.

Now, of course, it’s not the case that all things have to be equal, necessarily. We can imagine a world in which, despite having less “mind” in nature, atheistic philosophies still have as much draw to people who are mind-sensitive through having more focus on actual existing human minds.

However that doesn’t seem like it’s the way that things actually shake out in present day Western societies at least, and I’d guess situations where religions end up being significantly less human mind-sensitive relative to secular philosophies (rather than equal or greater) are relatively improbable.

* It would be interesting to compare in affective empathy levels in atheists and agnostics, to see if there is a sociopath-spectrum relative affective empathy deficit or “just” an autsim-spectrum relative cognitive empathy deficit.

The suggestion that some forms of fundamentalism may also have positive autism spectrum correlations due to the way they attempt to systematize religious law, perhaps at the expense of focus on minds and intentions of supernatural entities relative to the mainstream, is an interesting idea.

Appreciation of humor is connected to theory of mind and so it is somewhat unsurprising that a sense of humor is loosely (r = -.33) correlated to religiosity. (n = 56).

“religiosity (RF and orthodoxy) tended to predict low propensity to
humour creation”

Appreciation of humor and humor creation are kind of different. Women, who on average have greater theory of mind than men, tend to not be renowned for humor creation relative to men, and also aren’t really described as having so strong a defecit (or any deficit) in humor appreciation.

Also I kind of giggle when people talk about the diversity of atheists at atheist gatherings. It’s rather missing the point. After finally coming to grips with my own wrestling with my rather strong agency detection (in the overactive right temporal lobe sense, instead of the social one), the last thing I wanted to have anything to do with was religion, or the lack thereof. I got only so much time in existence, and there are a shit-ton of things to do and learn before my consciousness ceases. If God doesn’t exist, then why trouble yourself with what him and his followers are up to with those precious minutes? Moreover, some of the stuff they do is pretty fun. I love Christmas carroling, not because I’m into praising the baby Jesus, but because I love singing and playing music.

What I was implying was that people were not taking well to the idea that they might be in Any Way inferior to there believer counterparts intellectually (even implicitly via connection with autism) as that seems to be a tenet of their atheistic beliefs. And that the comments were often anti-social in tact towards the poster for even bringing up such an idea, which is humorous in light of the topic.

@AndrewV

being you’ve got the skillz with the block quotes and bolds I’ll take the stance you know what you are talking about, but can you please explain it to me cause I don’t fully understand? It’s not the prose so much as the relation and whether it’s sarcastic.

Here’s your chance to look down on me Darkseid! you smarty smart you!

for a disorder that affects less than 1% of the population, 92% accuracy could be very low – imagine that, for example, 3% of the non-autistics were wrongly identified as autisitcs – then, the giant majority of identified “autistics” will be false positives.

However it’s probably not a disorder but rather a very broad catch-all for a large spectrum of behaviors. Even when you talk about high functioning autistics (i.e. like Asperger’s which I’d lay good odds describes a lot of readers of this blog) you have people with pretty different limits. Then you have behaviors frequently confused with autism. For instance my son kept being thought of as autistic even though he was very social and techniques to deal with autism (such as holding tight) have exactly the opposite effect on him. But sense a subset of his behaviors matched high functioning autism he was labeled as autistic until we took him to speech and occupational therapists who instead identified him as having sensory integration disorder. They changed the therapy and he improved remarkably quickly.

My point is that most of these mental “disorders” aren’t really a single phenomena. And of course even disorder is a bit of a misnomer since it’s a spectrum issue relative to a norm – probably in a different social situation such as times before public schooling of the young it wouldn’t even be an issue.

While I don’t doubt one can identify a place in the spectrum with brain mapping, the underlying neurology is probably complex enough as to make 93% success pretty remarkable.

Your argument may be well-researched, but ultimately flawed. I may passionately hate that you are ignorant enough to believe what you wrote, but at least you researched before speaking. Most people on the Internet cannot say that.

Just because you gleaned from what seems like less-than reputable sources, that there seem to be similarities between the 2 completely different objects, atheism and autism, does not mean that being an atheist implies you may be autistic. Look at the IQ levels of people around the country; non-believers tend to have a higher average IQ than believers, would you say there’s something wrong with believer’s brains that causes the, to be stupid? I would, but for the sake of science, no, you would not.

Moral of the story: stop forcing your pro-Christian agenda onto the masses using “science.” It’s stupid.

Source: http://freethinker.co.uk/features/atheists-are-more-intelligent-than-religious-people/

You’re confounding group affiliation with individual differences. Sure, they may be correlated but they aren’t the same thing. I’m an atheist but I don’t feel the need to spend my time attending meetings of atheists. Same can be said about people who believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster or who love model trains. There are (many) other factors at play.

At our current level of understanding, speculation like this about complex behaviour may be worse than useless. People differ on belief in supernatural figures? There’s a gene for that!

I dress all in black, and I’m a nondenominational theist. However, Darkseid is probably one of the people you mentioned. Therefore, the attack felt extra personal, hence their immature reply.

The atheist I met wore Abercrombie. Like Ian, I noticed that she spent a lot of time talking about her atheism. It got old fast! I don’t like to talk about people’s non belief or belief systems. We won’t know until we’re dead, and until then, we’re all blundering about in the same fog. Arguing about this sort of thing always seems like a waste of time.

AndrewV, whenever someone use the phrase ‘To wit’ I think of that owl who’s call is often written as, ‘Tu wit, tu wu’

1) They’re usually self-selecting. P. Z. Meyers is known for his anti-theist criticism, therefore, he’s going to attract people who share his politics and tone.

2) Disagreement creates longer discussions than agreement.

3) People less interested in contentious discussions tend to drop out or just lurk.

4) The Greater Internet F-Wad Theory has partial support. But I suspect anonymity is less of a factor than the lack of visual feedback cues. There were Internet F-Wads back when the Internet was a small collection of academic mailing lists.

The type of discourse you can find at a site is going to depend a lot on the technical features, moderation policy, audience, and community norms. Because CMC is a unique mode and medium of communication, I don’t think you can make valid conclusions about how participants engage in face-to-face communication.

I think you read way too much animosity into me having a chuckle at a double standard.

I suspect that the apparent double standard may be classified as people behaving normally. To wit, many of us appear to have some sort of self invested in being “right”. So the possibility of being “wrong” is an inherent attack on the self, and must be defended with vigour less you suffer some sort of diminishable affect.

So the first thing I tend to question when a person claims that their only contact with atheists has been on line and they found it confrontational, what sparked it?

I will clarify. I self identify as an an atheist but I do not make a big deal out of it. So, I could have unknowingly met fellow atheists IRL.

An example of confrontational individuals of that ilk may be found below. This may not be a very good example by virtue of the fact that they were embroiled in turmoil over the Elevatorgate scandal. However, it is one that comes to mind. What sparked it? Perhaps I did when I said:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/07/gynofascists_are_invading_the.php#comment-4407537

It is somewhat difficult in my opinion, to impresss anyone with your ability to engage in a calm discussion yourself, when you give the impression that you not currently capable of the same.

I just did a quick review of my comments and responses. While I did at the time get an overall sense of hostility, enough for me to classify this somewhat facetiously as a hate site, I suspect that a more normative person than myself, would have responded somewhat more emotionally.

I think you read way too much animosity into me having a chuckle at a double standard.