Literalism and Autism

[Belacqua]

I like some arts but am not crazy about them.

This is the connection that I'm interested in. 

I'm trying to think of people who are crazy about the arts who are also anti-religion. (For the definition of "anti-religion," there are obvious examples on this forum.) 

I have long suspected that, deep down, most religion is a kind of aesthetic phenomenon. That religion and the arts appeal to the same people, and that the connection goes deeper than the mere fact that religions tended to commission art. 

Obviously there will be local cases and variations... Music, for example, can be entirely abstract and mathematical, with no "subject matter" other than itself. So this might well appeal to the kind of person who finds math beautiful, but not paintings. 

But rather than suggest a similarity between autism and literal reading, I might wonder about a link between the richness of art and the appeal of religion -- which encourages non-literal reading.