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I am a freethinking person that does not belong to any religious, political, or ideological group.

My primary concern is with education and all the problems that wouldn't exist if certain groups of people were more informed about certain subjects.

There appears to be a lack of skepticism in politics in general, with most political views resembling religious dogmas rather than well thought out positions. In the Atheist/Science/Skeptic community there is an extreme lack of good information on politics, particularly those of the Middle East which often results in faulty reasoning by even the brightest of intellectuals. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and particularly Christopher Hitchins are all victims of bad information or misinformation, much of which is the sole basis for some of their positions. One stark example is how western media misreported the president of Iran as saying that he wanted to "wipe Israel off the map". This has been uncritically cited by all the previous authors and the US media. The problem is that he just didn't say that, not in that sense, and if you hear the next few sentences that he uttered it is unequivocally clear that he was purposely taken out of context, referring only to democratic elections to remove the current Israeli regime, and followed by saying that he would respect any results of that election.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M ahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel

Scientific progress has been set back years by accepting evidence uncritically, such as fake fossils or spoon bending, and the problem continues today. I generally agree with the views of the above authors, and am in no way a fan of the Iranian president, but this is just one example of how even smart people can be fooled when they don't check their sources.

I have also found there to be an incredible lack of critical thinking within the progressive community. The majority of my leftist friends uncritically believe in unfalsifiable 911 conspiracy theories, while others have equally ridiculous beliefs about Nuclear power, fluoride, and other things where their information has been tainted or biased, or they simply lack the basic critical thinking skills necessary to determine likely fact from fiction.

I feel strongly that if knowledge of critical thinking, logical fallacies, and science in general were injected into political discourse and vice versa, we would then be able to seriously confront the real problems of the world that we live in.