I would say the priest’s mistake wasn’t merely having (or displaying) and ideology, but associating it with mysticism disjointed from any empirical or rational inspection.

That’s a good point, and it’s really what happens at a fundamental level when you decide your ideology is who you are. We all know someone whose identity is defined by what they consume, and we even joke sometimes like “you know if they’re vegan because they never stop talking about it.” It’s not rational to think the sanctity of an ideology should correspond with our own sanctity, but alas we fall into that trap so often as humans. How it happens can be like the frog in boiling water situation.

How do you have a conversation about whether or not the person you’re talking to is a human worthy of the dignity of discourse? How do you have a debate with someone who shows up wearing boxing gloves (much less an AR-15)? At some point, censorship is a kindness. It means ending the conversation before we hit the point of fighting words and irreconcilable differences.

300 years ago, someone would have said this instead:

How do you have a conversation about whether or not god exists and we are all subjects to his teaching? How do you debate with someone who shows up wearing the sin of misguided faith?

…all the while, they have no problem discussing the right way to punish your children versus a slave.

300 years from now, we will be the barbarians. We aren’t elevated beyond the issues of our past. We aren’t more “enlightened” now. We’re doing the same stuff as before under the current cultural context. The only difference now is, we have more awareness of this dynamic while typically considering it just a thing of the past.

We should have conversations with people because that helps them understand. Sometimes when we try to convince them to instead just bury the thoughts because they make you a bad person, all we actually do is inspire more curiosity and secrecy. What we certainly don’t do is figure out where these crazy ideas came from in the first place, which means we aren’t exactly solving the problem with any sense of longevity via the approach of censorship.

My take is that we all need to be compassionate to humans by understanding that we are all the same pallet of color, just with different mixes and strokes. We are always becoming something, never a static identity. If you were born Hitler, then you’d have grown up to be Hitler. The real question is, how do we use this knowledge for the betterment of mankind?