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 :That's stupid. The people in question have all been dead for centuries, we hardly know what they believed anyway, and practially the only reason we have heard of them at all is because they were considered heretics by their contemporaries. ""Heretic"" is, de facto, a neutral historical term for people who were thrown out of mainstream Christian churches for teaching heterodox doctrines. The article is not ""declaring"" them heretics, it's simply describing a historical fact.  "