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lessdazed comments on Positive Thinking - Less Wrong
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It seems that by "relevant" you meant something like "best at dividing my friends into distinct groups". However, the most relevant criteria to you are more likely attitude towards life and judgement. Therefore, you should try dividing people by those measures directly.
It's possible that the only principle needed for such a group to form is the absence of a similar group. It's not crucially important that a Christian group is doing something and rationality might not impel that thing, because humanity outside of Christianity might have caused it in the first place!
Wow, I cringed when I read that. Major Dark Side Epistemology at work here. This is precisely the problem with partially neutered religion, that is allowed to treat as normal an ideology formed specifically around (largely) recanted falsities. It was religion, in the first place, that told you it is wrong to hang out with people who don't share your beliefs. If not for religions' creating the idea of constraining relationships due to such things, you would not have thought you needed to defend associating with Christians.
Religions are organized falsehoods that depend on social restrictions to survive. Atheism does not depend on such an association and due to the Asch experiments I don't worry about you having any number of Christian friends provided that for most of their core propositions you have a friend who disagrees. One atheist could cover your bases, or a Muslim and a Taoist, etc.
"It was religion, in the first place, that told you it is wrong to hang out with people who don't share your beliefs."
Actually, my friends and relatives who are atheists have been WAY more judgemental about the fact that I go to church than my religious friends have been about my being a (fairly open) atheist.
What I am trying to say is three levels removed from your objection to it.
Associating with people is a proxy for believing as they do or taking their beliefs seriously, and I wouldn't particularly expect atheists to be less judgmental about associating with Christians than vice versa.
I am instead suggesting erroneous belief systems are the source of the belief that it is wrong to associate with people of different beliefs. Not that it is indicative of negative qualities, but wrong per se.
Also, it is the belief system that spawned the error, for false belief systems do relatively better in a meta-environment of discouraging freedom of association and encouraging group reinforcement than true belief systems do. This is a comment on belief systems and the negative consequence of false ones' persistence, not on any individuals who are members of the system.
Finally, the idea that belief systems should naturally discourage member contact with others has become so natural to you that you assume rationalist belief systems have it, and argue against the objection before it is raised. That it should seem so natural is sad, and I see it as a consequence of being surrounded by so many religious systems in modern American society.
1) The problem is not judging people based on their friends. This is sound Bayesian evidence, even if just a scrap. Be judgmental to the appropriate degree: too much is too much, and too little is too little. 2) The problem is that false belief systems have spawned the idea of limiting one's associations. 3) The problem is that the evil idea in 2) above has become viewed as natural, and even become an attitude rationalists are assumed to hold!
One comment: the atheist friends who judge me on associating with Christians are, for the most part, not professed rationalists. I doubt their belief systems are any more self-consistent than those of my religious friends; they just don't happen to contain God. I certainly don't think it should be part of any rationalist belief system to judge! Just that it happens to me (and it also happens to me from my brother, who DOES claim to be a rationalist and reads LessWrong) and that I find it unpleasant.
I like how you make the distinction between judging people based on the friends, and limiting contact with them based on your judgement. I do the first (probably a bit less than most people, but that has more to do with the fact that I have an "agreeable" personality than anything else) but I try very hard not to do the latter, and hate it when people (mostly coming from the atheist side) try to ask that of me.
But that could be the exception to the norm.