Fiach

From what I read of the Cathars (also called Albigensians in France and Italy, and Bogomils in the Balkans) they have a similar view as the Gnostics you describe.

They saw what all unbelievers see. That the Old Testament describes God as a terrible tyrant who kills without remorse, who causes disease, kills babies and orders followers (Israelites) to kill babies. He kills the world with a flood. How can that god be good, and be in such seeming conflict with Jesus' Sermon on the Mount?

They came up with the most obvious solution after the Persians gave them the character Satan (from Ahriman). The Persians had a duality that old Judaism lacked. So the obvious answer to Crusading Franks returning from the "holy land" was to opine that the Old Testament God was Satan, and Jesus came by his redemptive act to take back the world from the evil Satan/YHWH.

This was so rational compared to Catholicism that it began to spread and led to the Pope launching a very bloody crusade called the Albigensian Crusade. Humans naturally like Simon de Montfort used it as an excuse to loot treasures from the Cathar castles in the south of France around Toulouse and along the Pyrenees. Hundreds of thousands to millions are believed to have been slaughtered, even those who surrendered. Their brethren in the Balkans suffered some attacks but were saved (believe it or not) by the Islamic Ottoman Turks who conquered the areas in the 14th century. Those Bogomils then found more to like about Islam than Catholicism. They converted to Islam. And their descendants are today’s Islamic Bosnians, Albanians, and Kosovars.

Catharism may (in a relative sense only) be the most reasonable variety of the Abrahamic religions. Their "heresy" exposes the major Biblical flaws and contradictions of Judeo-Christianity.

Fiach

beastmaster

Hmm, I thought we had no knowledge of the beliefs of the Cathars except from what was said about them by the Catholic Church. I read (somewhere) that the persecution was so complete that none of their literature has survived.

Anyway, I agree that Gnosticism (generally) is the most reasonable stripe of Xnty. You have to concede that YHWH is a mean old fucker with a cruel sense of "good" and a perverted sense of "perfection."

Fiach

Actually we often learn a lot about a group like the Cathars from the rebuttals of Catholic apologetics. In rebutting Catharism they actually describe it. It fits well with the critiques of the Byzantines rebutting the Serbian, Albanian, Bulgar, Macedonian, and Greek Cathars known there as Bogomils. The histories of the area once conquered by the Ottoman Turks also described them, and the Turks preserved them from Christian destruction.

See SERBS, History, Myth,& the Destruction of Yugoslavia) by Tim Judah, Yale U. Press, 1997. pages 81-81.
HISTORY OF THE BYZANTINE STATE, George Ostrogorsky, Rutgers University Press, New Jersey, 1967. pp 268-269, 373.
Apparently the best description is from an originator of the heresy, Father Cosmas, a Bulgarian priest, described in exquisite detail in a letter to the Bulgarian Tsar Peter by Patriarch Theophylact of Constantinople. It is in Greek but there is a French translation with excellent commentary by H. Peuch and A. Vaillant, called "Le traité contre les Bogomiles de Cosmas le Prétre, Paris, 1945.

I read it in university Theology class, translating it into English for a fellow student. Fortunately I am fluent in French but I didn't keep a copy. I may see if I can get another copy from the national library in Paris. I also think the De Montfort family (Simon de Montfort) may have a private library on Catharism.

Fiach