noun

• 1A person believing in or practicing religious heresy.

  ‘It clearly would cover any incitement of hatred by the religious against its heretics, apostates, or members of other faiths.’

  More example sentences

  • ‘He was also an ardent heretic and freethinker, maybe an out-and-out atheist, and a vocal defender of the ideas of Charles Darwin.’
  • ‘The heretics Marcion and Valentinus believed that God was androgynous.’
  • ‘Persecuting witches or merely criticizing nonbelievers (as infidels, heretics, pagans, or gentiles) can unite the Faithful.’
  • ‘If the term ‘Christian’ is taken to include heretics, schismatics, and baptized apostates, it would still appear that most are damned.’
  • ‘I am English, born in Britain, but I am referred to as a heretic, unbeliever, infidel, etc., because I am a Pagan.’
  • ‘Can those of you who believe that pagans, Jews, heretics and schismatics can share in eternal life explain how you interpret this?’
  • ‘Any uprisings caused by religious heretics could bring pain and suffering to the whole Jewish population.’
  • ‘The Hussites, on the other hand, who broke away from the Holy Roman Empire in both political and religious senses, were heretics.’
  • ‘With the exception of Pangloss, the three other heretics are burned at the stake.’
  • ‘I think about Galileo dropping differently weighted things from the tower, only to be branded a heretic.’
  • ‘The new religions exalt secular saints, enforce dogma, punish heretics, value self-sacrifice, and sanctify writings.’
  • ‘Declared a heretic by the Pope he was banished from Rome and subsequently vanished, presumed murdered.’
  • ‘Consequently those who came to believe that orthodox teaching was inadequate or wrong risked being declared heretics.’
  • ‘Galileo was forced to repudiate his scientific knowledge lest he be declared a heretic by the official church.’
  • ‘They sought regeneration - a regeneration we can liken to that of the medieval heretic or saint.’
  • ‘Predictably, those trying to be midwives to these new theologies (note the plural) are being criticized as heretics, unorthodox, disturbers of the peace, etc.’
  • ‘Care needs to be taken to distinguish between teachers that are misguided and those that are rank heretics who have rejected the faith.’
  • ‘We went to a Catholic school; yet we were known to the nuns to be the children of heretics who had rejected the Pope's rulings.’
  • ‘That was when people began to rebel against their unfair practises and that was when the Priests began condemning people to death, claiming they were heretics and rebels.’

  Synonyms

  dissident, dissenter, nonconformist, unorthodox thinker, heterodox thinker, apostate, freethinker, iconoclast, schismatic, renegade, disruptor

  View synonyms

  1. 1.1A person holding an opinion at odds with what is generally accepted.
     ‘They were not, according to an older version of history that Johnson appears to accept, merely heretics reacting against an established orthodoxy.’
     More example sentences

     • ‘It enjoys demonising the elected representatives of the labour movement and treats its left critics as heretics to be cast aside and scorned.’
     • ‘Pooh-Bah's remark that he had evolved ‘from a globule of primordial protoplasm’ is even said to have ignited a popular interest in biology and the theories of Darwin, who had until then been rejected as a flaky heretic.’
     • ‘This issue features the shy guys and gals of Belle and Sebastian and Muse's Matt Bellamy under the spotlight, while the Human League are subjected to the rock 'n' roll heretic's obligatory critical eye.’
     • ‘Rejected as heretics only a few yeas ago, the ‘New Paradigmers’ - spreading the gospel of New Economy - have now become mainstreamers.’
     • ‘If the teacher is a leader, he must also be a sentry - a heretic to criticize the fools who would cast his pupils back into the dark ignorance they had just escaped.’
     • ‘He was called a heretic and a rebel, but one who transformed his rebellion into art.’
     • ‘On a global scale the critics of the system are labelled heretics and on a micro scale people like me still seek refuge in shopping when it all gets too much.’
     • ‘What we should not do is suppress dissent, close off argument and condemn those who question the standard line as heretics.’
     • ‘Bretz was called a dunce and a heretic, but over time his work became widely accepted.’
     • ‘George was set upon as heretic, denounced as a traitor and his government contract for a school history book mysteriously cancelled without explanation.’
     • ‘But you're really risking being branded a heretic just at the moment.’
     • ‘If he intervened to prevent her death, he would be branded a heretic.’
     • ‘The mob's ability to shout down and punish the heretics is present even today.’
     • ‘They regard opposition leaders, black and white, not only as political rivals but as dangerous religious heretics.’
     • ‘Writers and engravers of pornography came out of the demimonde of heretics, freethinkers and libertines who made up the underside of those formative Western developments.’
     • ‘Exploring the details of Farmer's life, however, reveals that she is, in a sense, not only the Lost Atheist, but also a feminist, a heretic, a social radical.’
     • ‘Perhaps Huck is even asking the essential question for heretics who believed in the duality of creation.’
     • ‘Like a number of other similar heretics, I believe that - upsetting as this may be to many, and provoking once again the fury of transplant surgeons - people from whom organs are harvested for transplants are not necessarily dead.’
     Synonyms

     critic, sceptic, questioner

     View synonyms