I’ll just come out and say it— I don’t think “heresy” is an interesting or useful concept today. I think it’s mostly useful in historical context. Why do I say that?
Because we don’t _need_ the type of strongly held beliefs, or mythology, that we had in the past: we have science to guide us through what we know we know and what we know we don’t know. Sure, in practice people will believe all sorts of ridiculous things, but the separation of church and state went a long way towards making the concept less useful.
I think we do need heresy if you look at science as a belief system. In that case, anti-scientific views would fairly be called heretical to science, right?
The problem is that “heretical” doesn’t seem to map well onto that case. Anti-scientific views usually come from a place of ignorance rather than new knowledge. They’re not novel ideas, they’re usually demonstrably false, or unfalsifiable views.
In the former case the ideas are just wrong (note that this is not a moral judgment), and in the latter case they fall outside the realm of science, meaning the two can probably be reconciled with enough mental gymnastics.
I think there are more suitably nuanced words we can use than “heresy” to more accurately describe ideas in this context.
Because we don’t _need_ the type of strongly held beliefs, or mythology, that we had in the past: we have science to guide us through what we know we know and what we know we don’t know. Sure, in practice people will believe all sorts of ridiculous things, but the separation of church and state went a long way towards making the concept less useful.