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Martin Luther wasn’t the first Christian to say fuck you to the Catholic Church and come up with a different way to pray to Jesus. The Cathars did it centuries earlier, and when they took hold in the south of France, Pope (not so) Innocent III said to the French king hey dude go fuck their shit up. And so the crown spent the next two decades doing exactly that.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: July 21, 1209--
Catharism had its roots centuries earlier, but only took hold in South France in the 11th century. Adherents were big into Jesus and referred to themselves as “Good Christians.” They were “dualist,” meaning they said there was a good god, the dude from the New Testament who created the spirit, and also a bad god from the Old Testament who created all the physical shit, including Earth. Yeah, the guy who created food and water and air and sex? Totes bad god. Later they called him Satan. Or maybe Satan’s dad. Who cares? It’s all bullshit.
Anyway, Cathars were taking hold in a province called Languedoc, and the Catholic Church made all these proclamations about it being bad, and it didn’t make any difference because these people wanted reform, saying the Catholic clergy is a bunch of money-grubbing immoral wankers and we think they should embrace poverty and rejection of physical pleasure like good Christians are supposed to. The pope was but I like my pleasures and said fuck it, crusading time. Because so many were located in the city of Albi, they called it the Albigensian Crusade, and the rest of France was motivated to crush the shit out of those dirty heretics because money. The pope said to French nobles hey after you waste those Cathar fucks you can keep their land. Oh, and we’ll forgive all your sins too so you’ll go to heaven for sure no matter how much you rape and murder.
And so, the crusaders martialed their forces from across Northern France, including some enthusiastic folks all the way from England who wanted to get in on the killing, and headed south. Their first major “engagement” began on July 21, 1209, although it was more of a massacre, at the city of Béziers. Through some dumbfuckery on the side of the defenders, the besieging force was able to enter the city the following day and start a wholesale slaughter. Prior to all the killing someone said hey there are Catholics in the town too. What about them? The crusader commander Arnaud Amalric infamously replied, “Kill them all. God will know His own.”
Amalric called it “divine vengeance,” proudly writing to the pope that, “Our men spared no one, irrespective of rank, sex or age, and put to the sword almost 20,000 people.” But they were just getting started. In all, the Albigensian Crusade killed at least 200,000 Cathars and perhaps as many as a million. It was a full-on genocide that obliterated the Cathar movement while strengthening the power of the French crown.
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I had to go look up theological dualism, and now I want to see a full artistic-liberties treatment of this idea: a god of the material world, drunk on its own power, terrorizing its creations. A god of the mind and spirit fights against the former. Jesus Christ could represent a weapon forged by the material god who nevertheless sacrifices himself for the cause of the spiritual god.
I’m a formerly-Christian atheist who loves blasphemous new ideas :)