None of that stuff is heresy. Most of it is crackpottery and kookish, but crackpots and kooks tend to get debunked rather than shouted down. With heretics there’s usually no attempt at good faith counterargument at all.
Oh, sure, when you agree with something controversial, it is just society being irrational. But when you disagree with something, it is obviously because it is crackpottery.
Don’t you think people who are against these “heresies” have exactly the same view?
Have you ever seen a person who believes in such things? They think they are being rational and society just shouts them down. Sometimes it is even true (obviously, society can’t debate the same things over and over, it would be ridiculous to have a discussion on whether rape is bad in prime time every week or so). The most obvious modern examples that makes it into news is the amount of racists, neonazis and misogynists who claim that they just want a debate and a public outcry from a big group of people to deplatform them to the point that they have to pay massive amounts of security fees when they make public speeches.
I have addressed your point but it seems you didn’t get, maybe I wasn’t clear enough, I hope in hindsight you will see what I meant.
Or look at moon landing conspiracy, or 9/11 conspiracy, people gather massive amount of evidence to support their claims. Simply applying a bit of empathy and retrospection should make you understand what’s the problem
what you are saying.
There are actual, fact-based debunkings of moon landing conspiracies, creationism, astrology, etc. That was my entire point and what makes these cases different from the evolution controversy or Lysenkoism.
Heresy comes from the Greek word for "choose" and it always means to pick-and-choose what to believe, against reason.
There are two faults of faith: doubt, or rejecting belief when there's a good reason for it; and superstition, or having faith when there's no good reason for it. (Similarly, the two faults of hope are despair and presumption.)
Heresy means picking one of those sides of faith. Superstitions are heresies because there are no good reasons to believe in things like anti-vax, horoscopes, tarot cards, knocking on wood, and anti-aging-cream.
Doubts are heresies because there are good and established reasons to believe in things like the moon landing, the Big Bang theory, and evolution.
