there is a growing lobby who see autism as totally negative and dangerous - and autistics in the same way. It's a lot to do with teh vax=autism canard and the "search for a cure" movement.
Hanging around with "autism moms" - who can be of any sex and are not the same as "people who are parents to an autistic child" - measn I see a lot of it.
It's not at all clear to me how autism came into a discussion of atheism and eugenics. My understanding is that autism has complex causes including possibly the interaction of several genes. It would be one of the more difficult things to eliminate from the gene pool, even if someone wanted to do so, which I doubt.
That said, I certainly don't notice a "growing lobby" seeing autism as totally negative and dangerous. What I see is an increased level of public understanding and compassion towards autistic people, and a recognition that some kinds of autism may even be beneficial to society.
If proof were needed, it is in the number of people who take pride in half-jokingly referring to themselves as "a bit autistic" or "on the spectrum" when all they mean is they pay attention to detail, or they like things to be tidy, or they have an inflated idea of the importance of apostrophes in the grand scheme of things.
The "autism mom" has become A Thing, even in the UK where we say "mum" or "mam" — or did until recently. On the one hand, autism moms say, correctly, that their child should not be defined by his or her syndrome; but on the other hand, they define themselves by their child's syndrome.
There is a danger that going on about it as much as some of them do will be counterproductive and lose them sympathy.
But back to St Anselm and his ontological argument:
St Anselm said that "God is the greatest thing imaginable."
In most translations, this is expressed as "God is that than which no greater can be imagined." This always struck me as adding complexity and obscurity in order to give spurious credibility to the rest of the argument.
Being "the greatest thing imaginable" is one of many characteristics of the Christian God. I suggest that it is somewhere down most people's lists, below creator of the universe, creator of mankind, omnipotent, omnipresent, benevolent, etc.
It is also an inferred characteristic rather than an inherent one: what is "imaginable" surely depends on the strength of the imagination, rather than on what is being imagined.
St Anselm takes this one small part of the description of God and turns it into a definition. For the rest of his argument, he sets out to prove that the "Greatest thing imaginable" exists. Then when he believes he has done so, he works backwards from his questionable definition to prove that, therefore, God exists.
A comparison: Plato set out to define
man and came up with, "Man is a featherless biped."
This is an accurate description of man, but it is a lousy definition. He is defining the species by two incidental characteristics. Not all men are bipeds, and not all featherless things are men.
Diogenese then presented Plato with a plucked chicken and said, "Behold, your man!" 1–0 to Diogenese.
The next step of St Anselm's argument is that the greatest thing imaginable must exist, because if we imagine two identical things, but one exists and the other doesn't, then the one that exists is "greater".
I imagine a 40 metre crocodile that I acknowledge is imaginary, and I imagine a 40 metre crocodile and imagine that it "exists".
A 40 metre crocodile that exists is certainly a scarier proposition than one that doesn't, and I suppose we could call it "greater". However, the fact that I imagine that it exists does not mean that it does.
In St Anselm's argument, imagining that something exists somehow makes it necessary that it exists. I call BS.
In fact, many (most?) theologically inclined Christians would probably argue that God is so great that His entire majesty and power is beyond the scope of human imagination. To these people, I suggest that God is not "the greatest thing imaginable" but that God is "a being so great that we cannot adequately imagine Him."
St Anselm's argument is a typical example of a clever man setting out to prove what he already believes. It is a specious argument, disguised with pseudo philosophical language. It does not prove that God exists, but, equally, demolishing the argument does not prove that God does not exist.
Own position: I'm an atheist based on an analysis derived from a logical positivist approach. If God is omnipotent and ineffable, as theologians would have us believe, then there is no set of circumstances that could not be explained by the existence of God. A hypothesis that could be used to explain every conceivable set of experimental results or observed data is neither right nor wrong, just meaningless.