people we don't know

The two or three of you who are regular readers of this blog will know that insomnia is a recurring affliction, and when I don't sleep I tend to ruminate, and some of those meditations become posts on this blog. Recently, I've come out as an atheist, written about my confusion about some southerners, and reported an article (from Canada! Home of tolerance and politeness!) on people's mistrust of atheists.

I think there's a relationship between the southern gal's friendliness to people she knows, and the mistrust of atheists. I've just finished Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. One of the things he argues is that people seem to work better in groups of up to about 150; after that, groups become unwieldy. He makes reference to Hutterite communities, where groups will separate off when they get larger than about that size, and the Gore Corporation (makers of Gore-Tex), which tries to limit its corporate groups to about that number of employees. I suspect that this is a limit size for people's ideas of who's in their community.

Edit 12/8/11: That 150-person limit is also known as Dunbar's Number, which apparently ranges between 100-230.

Here's the relationship that I suspect: People know that the people within their groups are reasonably honest (see the brief discussion of people belonging to groups in my "coming out as an atheist" post, linked above). But they also know we live in a world that is sometimes dangerous. There's no way to determine if the people outside our group have the same values as the people inside. So for the people we don't know, it's better not to trust them with our tax dollars, or anything else. And since we can't count on them having values of compassion or reason, to inform their interactions with strangers (including their interactions with us), it would be better if they were at least afraid of divine punishment.

Atheists, however, don't have that. Further, if one lives in a culture where everyone is a churchgoer, atheists have the further disadvantage of being just weird. How can anyone trust them?

The solution, probably, is for atheists to become more common (as I think it was for LGBT folks; it turns out EVERYBODY knows LGBT folks; they're not as rare or strange as we thought).

Well, I'm one of those atheists. You can decide if I'm trustworthy or not.