How would you define ideology? As a person's current set of beliefs? Or as a set of vehemently held beliefs?
Argument is the process of applying logic to a set of ideas. It is based on the premise that logic alone can yield insights and both participants try to use logic to point out fallacies in their opponent's arugment.
If you believe that ideology is someone's current set of beliefs, then ideology is not threatening, as you have a good shot of changing someone's ideology through logic and argumentation.
However, if you believe that ideology is a dogma that someone viciously clings to, then there is no reason to bother arguing, as it could never result in the person conceding a point or changing an opinion.
I the former definition applies to most intelligent people.
In my case, all of my beliefs are provisional. I don't know anything for certain, but I may still engage in argument. I won't necessarily preface the argument with an in-depth acknowledgement of all of the holes I see in the beliefs at hand. Instead, I will see how well they stand up to my opponent's assaults. After all, I've already admitted to myself that they have holes, so now before I abandon them I should give them one last stand to see how they do.
A successful argument is one in which a) I discover more holes, or b) I realize that something I thought was a hole isn't.
Logical argument is quite unlike javascript where there are obvious ways of empirically testing a result. In the more abstract areas of programming there are massive arguments (see LKML, etc.) because it is hard to simply empirically test the result... the concepts are abstract and interwoven, etc.
To read the arguments on LKML, one sees that they are more socratic, more focused on the abstractions and hence are more subject to "ideology" being used rather than simple assertions.
So if you dismimss "ideology" as necessarily uninformed, you are asserting your own "ideology" onto the discussion.
What is a non-ideological argument? Is it something like this?
Person 1: I can't be sure, but I think there is a chance that A
Person 2: I see. I agree that there is a chance that A, but I think there is a greater chance that B.
Person 1: We both make good points.
Person 2: Indeed.
While the above may be an abundantly mature way to address A and B, I find a spirited argument far more informative. For the same reason, I find that it's easier to learn about the nuances of a political issue by reading op-eds written from various perspectives than from reading one supposedly objective "news" article.
Actually, the two are much closer than you think. All major religions achieved their growth and status by becoming the ideological arm of state power. Both politics and religion are fundamentally about how people think about the rulers.
"All major religions achieved their growth and status by becoming the ideological arm of state power." I wonder whether that's true. Because it seems hard to distinguish from this: "All major religions, because of their growth and status, acquired state power which fuelled their further growth."
To distinguish between the two, we'd want to look for religions that (presumably by good luck) got significant state power before they became widespread. Someone who knows more history than me may have more clue here, but the only example I can think of is that of the pharaoh Ankh-en-aten (= Akhnaten), who basically tried to introduce monotheism into ancient Egypt, with scarcely any success after the end of his reign. That's hardly conclusive, but it seems like evidence for the hypothesis that widespread belief matters more than state power in getting a religion off the ground.
