Everyone clings to some ideology. Everyone. It may be political, social, or religious but everyone has one. If you don’t see that in yourself, well, you’re an idiot.

I’m not saying that having an ideology is bad, as long as we’re willing to listen to an opposing view. It’s those that hold to their view, no matter how the evidence falls against them worries me.

We see this mainly with the religious, but we also see the same with skeptics. How’s that, you ask?

We see political and socially driven skeptics; Those that have an agenda to pursue a belief that those that don’t agree with them cannot be either a skeptic and especially an atheist.

I don’t think that skepticism or atheism has a particular ideology. One is the application of reason, the other is just non-belief. As far as I know, there’s no general rule for skeptics to be ideologically pure. Neither atheists.

Ideology is a poison to skeptics. More than that, it can become a disease that will destroy someone’s ability to impartially reason. We’ve seen that with some. Disagreement becomes is harassment. Asking for evidence? Forget it. Presenting evidence means nothing. Skepticism doesn’t fit in their ideology.

We need to come to the realization that we’re all ideological in one form or fashion, but we should never allow ideology to define us. You can hold on to your ideology as long as you don’t hold it too tightly. Those that do? Well, they’ve left their ability to reason behind and are nothing more than propagandists.

Questioning one another should not be a sentence to the Gulag.