Heresy
Non-religious usage

In other contexts the term does not necessarily have pejorative overtones and may even be complimentary when used, in areas where innovation is welcome, of ideas that are in fundamental disagreement with the status quo in any practice and branch of knowledge.

Scientist/author Isaac Asimov considered heresy as an abstraction, mentioning religious, political, socioeconomic and scientific heresies. He divided scientific heretics into: endoheretics, those from within the scientific community; and exoheretics, those from without. Characteristics were ascribed to both and examples of both kinds were offered. Asimov concluded that science orthodoxy defends itself well against endoheretics (by control of science education, grants and publication as examples), but is nearly powerless against exoheretics. He acknowledged by examples that heresy has repeatedly become orthodoxy.

Publishing his findings as The Dinosaur Heresies, revisionist paleontologist Robert T. Bakker, himself a scientific endoheretic, treated the mainstream view of dinosaurs as dogma:

I have enormous respect for dinosaur paleontologists past and present. But on average, for the last fifty years, the field hasn't tested dinosaur orthodoxy severely enough.

He adds that, "Most taxonomists, however, have viewed such new terminology as dangerously destabilizing to the traditional and well-known scheme." The illustrations by the author show dinosaurs in very active poses, in contrast to the traditional perception of lethargy.

Immanuel Velikovsky is an example of a recent scientific exoheretic; he did not have appropriate scientific credentials and did not publish in scientific journals. While the details of his work are in scientific disrepute, the concept of catastrophic change (extinction event and punctuated equilibrium) has gained acceptance in recent decades.

The term heresy is used not only with regard to religion but also in the context of political theory. The term heresy is also used as an ideological pigeonhole for contemporary writers because, by definition, heresy depends on contrasts with an established orthodoxy. For example, the tongue-in-cheek contemporary usage of heresy, such as to categorize a " Wall Street heresy" a " Democratic heresy" or a " Republican heresy", are metaphors that invariably retain a subtext that links orthodoxies in geology or biology or any other field to religion. These expanded metaphoric senses allude to both the difference between the person's views and the mainstream and the boldness of such a person in propounding these views.
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