Yeah. Thinking up weird and wacky possibilities to what goes on in the universe is the easy part of being human, and of course it's only natural to begin there; but there is an obligation, I think, to listen to and consider ways your belief might have been based on something daft. And if someone can demonstrate that it has been, then there's an obligation to learn - either by modifying one's beliefs, or by abandoning them.
The cavemen of the past didn't have someone saying "of course there isn't a dragon over the hill causing lightning. In fact, here, give me a frog's leg, let me show you how you can create little bolts of lightning right here at home." But once they did, the only way to hold on to beliefs that have been knocked down is through sheer stubbornness.
If a person should know better, then there's a point at which an "entitlement to opinion" is really just an egotistical way of willfully ignoring it.
That said, many things *are* completely a matter of opinion, and where many politicians go wrong is that no matter how laid out your line of reasoning, if a person just doesn't value what a conclusion requires them to value, they won't come to the same conclusions. That's fine. I can argue in favor of my values, but I can't change the way different people value different things. But methodologies shouldn't be a matter of values.
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