But not all opinions are equal, regardless the opinion that many express to the contrary.
To mangle an otherwise perfectly fine comment by a character in a James Doohan/S. M. Stirling novel, Ah, Congress, “…[w]here mountains of supposition are constructed from molehills of [mis]information and presented as incontrovertible fact.”
*heh*
Let me back up to the question of authority. There are three basic types of authority: divine (whether modern pagan humanists recognize it or not), natural and constructed.
Setting aside divine authority, for most humans–apart from the proclamations of The Church of Anthropogenic Global Waming nutjobs and satanic phony “Christian” pastors and their siblings in other cults–do not presume to possess divine authority, I’d like to briefly address the other two classes.