What would make this post and any comments substantive is to actually look to the historical and technical[0] meaning instead of drawing on vague popular sentim

What would make this post and any comments substantive is to actually look to the historical and technical[0] meaning instead of drawing on vague popular sentiments. A good first step is to look at the etymology which brings us to the Greek "hairein" or "to choose". Thus a heretic is one who, given a sum total of truths, picks and chooses what he pleases (the causes behind his picking and choosing are variable, so we may speak of formal and material heresy, the former of which is the graver condition since it involves obstinacy and not mere error). This is rather clear in the original religious context[0]. In other contexts, like the case of science or popular opinion, it does not seem to make sense to speak of heresy. It would be odd for me to deny something rather well-established without giving substantive reasons for my denial, but it would not constitute heresy. But perhaps something analogous to the spirit of heresy can be said to exist in principle when someone has an attitude of selectivity where truths in general are concerned. The article is, in this sense, using the common figurative meaning of "heresy", and not the technical meaning, which is to say a belief that contradicts something not only widely held, but dearly held within some milieu. This is why lately people have spoken of cancel culture as the excommunication of heretics for breaking ranks with the prevailing orthodoxy. At the same time, one is tempted to conclude that the use of "heresy" is not so figurative as one might imagine, even if not bona fide heresy[1]. The ideologies that underpin cancel culture, for example, are functionally religious (all men are religious in this sense since all men construe something to be the highest good, which is to say their god or rather idol, and thus that which they worship and order their lives in accordance with). Now, if you do not accept these ideologies, then you cannot be said to be a heretic, only an infidel. But within the group that holds to a general common ground (in this case, "the Left"), those within the ranks who depart from the reigning ideology are something like heretics. Those who migrate to "the Right" are thus something like apostates. [0] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07256b.htm https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07256b.htm [1] Bona fide in the sense that in order for something to be heretical, it must pick and choose from a body of doctrine that is true and not merely held as true. If a body of doctrine is riddled with error, picking the truths out of the whole is not heretical in any objective sense, though in a relative sense (that is, as merely seen by those who hold that body of doctrine to be fully correct), we often say that such people are heretics vis-a-vis that body of doctrine.