heretic
/ˈhɛrɪtɪk
/noun
1A person believing in or practising religious heresy.It clearly would cover any incitement of hatred by the religious against its heretics, apostates, or members of other faiths....
- 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.
Synonyms
dissident, dissenter, nonconformist, unorthodox thinker, heterodox thinker, apostate, freethinker, iconoclast, schismatic, renegade;
sceptic, agnostic, atheist, non-theist, non-believer, unbeliever, idolater, idolatress, pagan, heathen;
separatist, sectarian, revisionist
rare tergiversator, recreant, recusant, nullifidian
archaic paynim
1.1A person holding an opinion at odds with what is generally accepted.It is odd - odd in the extreme - that Barns, the iconoclast, the heretic, uncritically accepts the myths surrounding the birth of the Liberal Party propagated by the elders of the tribe....
- They were not, according to an older version of history that Johnson appears to accept, merely heretics reacting against an established orthodoxy.
- It enjoys demonising the elected representatives of the labour movement and treats its left critics as heretics to be cast aside and scorned.
Origin
Middle English: from Old French heretique, via ecclesiastical Latin from Greek hairetikos 'able to choose' (in ecclesiastical Greek, 'heretical'), from haireomai 'choose'.