One of the greatest gifts skepticism has given me is the freedom to have terrible, awful, horrible thoughts. Things you're not supposed to think about. Anti-social, nasty things. Back when I was religious, I ran away from such thoughts. You're not supposed to think about things that are unpleasant or sinful. Push them away, refuse to think about them, pray to overcome them, run away, ignore, deny.
But since I became a skeptic and realized, gratefully, that there is no magic genie listening to my every thought, I have been free to entertain some of those ideas and to judge them on their individual merits.
It's so much more liberating to think about something controversial or frightening or culturally unacceptable and then let it go because the evidence suggests it's not true (or the opposite) than to push it away, unresolved, because the powers that be say it's forbidden to even think about. Bad ideas should be rejected because they're not true or unrealistic or measurably harmful, not because some book written thousands of years ago says that they're sinful.
It's the difference between shoving all of your garbage under the sofa in the hopes that it will magically disappear and actually taking out the trash and giving the house a good scrubbing. One ignores the problem; the other solves it.
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