Ryan, I’m afraid I don’t really follow your argument. It would seem (if I’ve understood you correctly) that there’s a Venn set in your primary contention. Something can either be (i) someone’s opinion that is also empirically supported, or (i) someone’s opinion that has little or no empirical support. There’s no inherent opposition, merely a different set relationship. In other words, (i) is the intersection of the set of beliefs and the set of empirically demonstrated elements. Moreover, your argument appears to assume there’s no connection between belief and empirical evidence, but one could argue that many who are in the overlap of the two Venn sets are there precisely because they’ve based their beliefs on the available empirical evidence, as opposed to something they uncritically absorbed from an Internet meme or gif.

Furthermore, I can’t see the connection between dismissing a belief for which there is no empirical support with the abandonment of “morality” (whatever that may be). We know from evolutionary anthropology that as a group primate species we’ve a lot of inherited behaviors that promote group cohesion. These include things like wanting to punish cheats, mate guarding, and aspiring to a higher place in the group hierarchy. Morality doesn’t exist in some abstract realm; it’s a concrete and highly relative set of behaviors resulting from eons of selection pressures. As such, one can’t appeal to “morality” for anything at all, much less the apparent notion that basing one’s opinions on empirical data can lead to causing moral harm to others.

In short, unless I’ve completely misunderstood the intent of your article, I just can’t see the necessary connections that would string the argument together and reach the conclusion you appear to arrive at.