Holy Sh*t

     If you believe that an all-powerful, all-knowing deity designed the universe and created us in His image, yet somehow still ended up with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, then you might want to skip this chapter.

    Same goes if you’re an atheist who scoffs at religion but refuses to watch your home football team without donning the “lucky” underwear you had on when they last made the playoffs—sometime in the late Cretaceous.

    And don’t get me started on agnostics—the religious commitaphobes who perpetually retain the fundamental question of existence in their ontological shopping cart, just in case they need overnight shipping during a crisis.

    Let’s be honest—none of us is above nonsense. We just curate it differently. We organize it, decorate it, and turn it into meaning—sometimes with incense. Nobody gets a monopoly on truth. My neurodiverse mind tends to prefer the clean lines of empirical reasoning and testable claims. But I’m not saying that it’s better than believing in the irrational. It leaves plenty of questions unanswered. But at least it doesn’t ask for blind faith and a monthly donation.

    If someone tells me an invisible sky being has a plan for me, I need to see the flowchart—with dependencies, contingencies, and the option to file a support ticket. But religion, superstition, and spiritual systems don’t work like that. They present beliefs that can’t be tested or falsified—and then demand total commitment. Not just to the dogma, but to regular in-person gatherings—complete with the stuff of neurodivergent nightmares: group singing, sustained eye contact, and footwear designed to atone for your sins.

    But I get that there are many reasons people turn to religion. Some just enjoy having a cosmology they can understand without needing a PhD in particle physics, or a corkboard covered in yarn. For them, religion provides a helpful narrative that explains how the world works, why people suffer, and what to do when confronted with mystery like the close-door buttons in elevators.

    But for me, the story never ends with their answer. I hear it and immediately think of ten follow-up questions. Their narrative isn’t closure, and nothing makes my brain itch like a system that insists I stop asking.

    Religion also provides moral clarity for people who like knowing they’re on the side of good, and that eventually—possibly after several millennia and a series of confusing prophecies—the good guys will win. This is very satisfying if you enjoy being righteous, and slightly less satisfying if you discreetly restock your home linen from hotels.

    Rigid good-versus-evil narratives are more confusing than comforting—especially when the stories are full of contradictions, moral loopholes, and post hoc edits. Just within the Abrahamic traditions, I’m expected to reconcile a wrathful Old Testament deity who floods the world for disobedience, a New Testament figure who preaches love and fishes for brunch, and an Islamic tradition that both confirms and rewrites the previous two.

    Even within a single religion, I’m presented with multiple versions of the same events, conflicting genealogies, and centuries of revisionist theology—all glued together with footnotes and faith. For a brain that craves consistency, this isn’t a moral framework—it’s a hamster wheel on fire. While I can’t seem to claw my way past the contradiction between divine omniscience and free will, everyone else has moved on to group chanting and post-sermon donuts.

    But let’s be honest: many people turn to religion because they’re terrified of death. Not just death, but nonexistence—the idea that one day you might simply vanish, surviving only in some people’s memory like the hair on the crown of my head. For them, the idea of an afterlife provides existential anesthesia.

    For neurodivergent folks, death is at least remarkably consistent. It doesn’t play favorites. It doesn’t change the rules halfway through or expect you to sense them from tone of voice and vague social cues. It applies to everyone—regardless of charisma, decoding skills, or how well they did in group projects. In a world that runs on neurotypical rules, death is refreshingly fair.

    Personally, I’m not afraid of being dead—I’m afraid of dying in a way that’s so stupid it gets passed around as a cautionary meme. Like bleeding out from over-flossing my teeth. Or overdosing on Rogaine after a long and courageous battle with male-pattern baldness. If there turns out to be an afterlife, I just hope it doesn’t open with, “Seriously? That’s how you went out?”

    Now, some of my neurodivergent brothers and sisters are deeply religious. But let’s just say their devotion comes with some unique features. I know one guy who can tell you, without breaking a sweat, how many times the letter “o” shows up in every edition of the King James Bible. (So many, by the way, I’m surprised he didn’t convert to a religion with fewer vowels.)

    Another believes she has calculated the exact number of milliseconds between the death and resurrection of Jesus, which I assume involved both advanced calculus and way too much time on her hands.

    But if you live near me on the spectrum, you reside in the midst of a highly logical, rational neighborhood where every utterance requires footnotes, and debates are settled with ruthlessly fact-checked research. I make use of science, philosophy, math, and other pesky disciplines that tend to be fussy about “evidence,” “reason,” and “not just making up stuff.” This has always suited me just fine—until gainful employment forced me to mingle with the residents of the Gaussian Goldilocks Zone, where the supernatural is natural, the irrational is rationalized, and God has been authenticated by a holy CAPTCHA challenge.

    This is not just a problem for atheists. Religion is one of those things where even people who agree still somehow don’t agree. You can have two people who both believe in the same God, but Sockless Bob insists He’s super chill and forgiving, while Aunt Martha is convinced He’s keeping a detailed spreadsheet of your late-night browsing history.

    There are Christian Scientists who believe illness can be defeated through prayer—an admirable sentiment that is ever so slightly less comforting when your thermometer reads “Update your will. Now.”

    Some New Age folk think the key to enlightenment involves crystals, essential oils, the position of the stars when you were born, or standing in just the right part of a stone circle—I suppose to get better Wi-Fi from the universe.

    And then there are the Scientologists, who believe the path to spiritual freedom involves coursework, credit cards, and an alarming number of legal disclaimers.

    The one consistent thing about religion—besides the fact that every holy site somehow has a gift shop—is that the faithful are absolutely certain that their beliefs are 100% correct, and that everyone else is either hilariously misinformed or doomed to spend eternity in a waiting room with no vending machines and a radio locked to a sports call-in show.

    And this mindset doesn’t stop at religion. It bleeds into secular matters—Mac vs. PC, Democrat vs. Republican, Crumple vs. Fold.

    Normlings seem perfectly happy wandering this chaotic ideological buffet without ever gagging on existential doubt—often sampling a little of this, a dash of that, and mistaking the whole mess for a coherent moral framework or a fitting foundation of their politics. Which would be fine if everyone kept their religion to themselves. But this is America, where athletes feel morally obligated to point at the sky after knocking their opponent unconscious, politicians refer to the Almighty when pushing tax cuts for themselves, and country music singers are legally required to start every pronouncement by thanking both Jesus and their pickup truck.

    Two things are certain. Nobody is going to change their mind, and religion tends to be a very touchy subject. I’m reminded of this every time I make the neurodivergent mistake of trying to process an implausible story through the overzealous quality-control department inside my skull. One minute I’m innocently wondering how Jonah survived inside a whale, and the next I’m being escorted out of the barbecue by a guy named Pastor Rick, who’s quoting Revelation and baptizing my potato salad in holy ranch dressing.

    So it’s not like you can meet someone’s theological musings with evidence or gently propose they save the cosmic material for their memoirs. I’ve tried that. More than once. I’ll never get those hours back, and my only comfort is knowing they died so I could avoid future ambush sermons.

    Somewhere in the debris of that experience, I realized I needed coping strategies. Not because I’m trying to win a debate, but because my alternaut nervous system can only withstand so much unsolicited certainty before attempting to climb out of my body. With a little practice—and a healthy dose of strategic ambiguity—I discovered I could survive cosmological chatter with my dignity intact while avoiding another incident at a barbecue.

    Here are a few of the tactics I developed the hard way:

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      The Respectful Redirect: Just nod thoughtfully and say “Huh, that’s interesting. Hey, do you think the first person to ever drink cow’s milk had some explaining to do?”

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      The Divine Downgrade: Agree so enthusiastically they think you’ve had a revelation, then casually undercut it with a less consequential cosmic curiosity. “Oh yes, the universe is absolutely mysterious! Just yesterday, I saw my cat staring intensely at a wall for 30 minutes, and when I checked, there was nothing there.”

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      The Sacred Nonsense: If someone keeps pushing their beliefs on you, make up a completely absurd spiritual philosophy and say it with absolute confidence. “In my tradition, we’ve discovered that playing Pee-wee Herman backwards reveals dietary directives from the deities of digestion. This is why we only eat foods that can be juggled.”

    And when none of those work, I fall back on what got me through corporate meetings: gaming the experience. Every time they contradict themselves, I award myself ten points. I get a 25-point bonus when they contradict themselves twice in the same sentence, as in this actual pronouncement from an agnostic: “I neither believe nor disbelieve, and I’m absolutely sure that uncertainty is the one true path.”

    Buzzword Bingo works here, too. I fill my card with banal religious phrases (“God works in mysterious ways,” “It’s all part of a plan,” or “Everything happens for a reason.”)

    Conversion tactics earn double points (“What if you’re wrong?” “God loves you,” or “I found Jesus and got promoted to assistant lead cashier the very next year.”)

    I award myself a wildcard space if they invoke Pascal’s Wager, cite a near-death experience involving a bright light, or claim that Einstein probably believed in “a higher power.”

    Atheists get their squares, too. “If God created the universe, who created God?” “Religion is a crutch.” “What about the problem of evil and suffering?” Bonus points if they refer to themselves as “freethinkers,” because nothing radiates freedom of thought like announcing your intellectual independence with a label shared by millions of people who think exactly the same way.

    Here’s what I’ve learned: my brain simply isn’t wired to decode someone else’s cosmology, and I tremble at sectarian conflict and emotional intensity. So when someone unloads their worldview on me—religious, non-religious, or still running on factory settings—I turn it into a game. Instead of engaging, I see how many times I can pivot to raccoons, convince them I worship The Divine Waffle Iron, or rack up points as the inevitable clichés roll in.

    And when the social temperature rises past tolerable, I widen my eyes and whisper, “It’s happening,” before sprinting away at full speed—leaving them to wonder whether they’ve just witnessed the start of the apocalypse or the worst case of Montezuma’s Revenge in recorded history.