10:09am November 27, 2013

Anyone noticed…

youneedacat:

How your religious or spiritual beliefs are seen very differently when you’re disabled?

Like it’s either…

…you’re stupid or naive so you’re religious.

…you’re crazy so you’re overly religious and you’re probably delusional.

…you’ve got epilepsy (especially temporal lobe epilepsy) so your spiritual experiences are probably seizures, even when they bear no resemblance to ecstatic seizures.

(And then there’s the way that the existence of ecstatic seizures are used to prove that religion is bunk because spiritual experiences are all seizures. Except that this makes no sense. Seizures can also cause you to hallucinate an object that you’ve seen before, it doesn’t mean the original object wasn’t real. Just because you can induce fake spiritual experiences by seizures, drugs, or magnetic stimulation, doesn’t mean that the real thing isn’t real.)

…you’re an atheist because you’re cognitively disabled and don’t understand enough abstraction to understand religious concepts.

…you’re very devout because disabled people are closer to God(s).

…you’re very devout because disabled people are innately and mysteriously spiritual in a way that nondisabled people aren’t.

etc.

You’re never just allowed to be religious (or not-religious), in whatever form, the same way other people are. They always link it back to your disability and make it seem like you’re stupid, naive, or out of touch with reality in some way. And quite often you’ll be used by people who are either for, or against, your religion, as an example in some way.

And even when there is some connection between your disability and your beliefs, people will grossly exaggerate or distort it for their own ends.

And even some disabled people will play into this. Sometimes because we come to believe what we’ve been told (just like happens with all stereotypes). Sometimes for much more disturbing reasons (something to exploit ourselves, or because someone else is exploiting us — not that we’re all poor pitiful things to be exploited, but it does happen).

This is why even though I do think some of my spirituality (and the forms it takes) is tied to some of my disabilities, I get very angry when people exaggerate or distort that connection for their own reasons. I was exploited for things like that when I was younger and I take it really seriously.

Oh another thing that pisses me off is the way that people who exploit us can never tell the difference between spiritual and psychic — typically in a newage context. I dealt with a lot of that when I was younger, especially because I have really intense pattern-sensing abilities connected to my variant of autism, that get misconstrued as psychic sometimes. And it really screwed me up in a lot of ways and I hate seeing it happen to other people. It’s why for a very long time I was unwilling to talk about any of these topics at all, I was so afraid someone would misconstrue it and misuse it, deliberately or otherwise.

And it is seriously damaging to elevate people for things like this, because one important component of just about every spiritual practice I’ve ever heard of is humility. That doesn’t go with putting people on a pedestal, whether yourself or anyone else. And disabled people get put on spiritual and religious pedestals all the time. Or else get considered incapable of understanding it. Or else get considered to only be religious because we’re incapable of understanding why not to be. All of which is horrible, patronizing, and horrible.

Seeing as so many people know jack shit about autism, I have to deal with this a lot. You know that stereotype about how “autistic people are trapped in their own little world”? Well, I’ve run across a shit-ton of people who say I’m only pagan because that’s “my little autistic world.”

Then there’s the fact that I’ve run into pagans who have straight-up told me I can’t be a “real pagan” because paganism is all about love and light and don’t you know that autistic people are souless beings who can’t love anything? (*eyeroll*)

I recently found out that someone in my pagan group has been spreading a rumor that I’m making up my connections to Loki and Hel, and you know why I overreacted when I heard that? ‘Cause of both of the above things.

I’m also extremely devout in my practice. I love my religion, and I’m really, really enthusiastic about it. So of course, people write this off as an “autistic obsession.” And because people sometimes just assume that all Autistics are atheists for some reason, they would sometimes just tell people “she’s just obsessed with Norse mythology.” When I was a kid, this basically gave teachers free reign to mock my beliefs because it was just an “obsession,” not my religion (and apparently it’s totally ok to make fun of the Autistic kid, even if you’re a grown-ass adult).

Then you get into anything to do with psychic abilities. This is stuff I kind of hate talking about, because if I mention having any sort of abilities, I’m afraid that people will either write me off as crazy or, as the OP mentioned, exaggerate and distort it (in this case, it would probably distorted along the lines of “see, disabled people really do have special abilities to compensate for their problems” or “they really are more spiritual”).

And all of the above (OP included) are among the reasons I decided to go for the religious studies certificate and the community leadership minor.