This is all going off of memory, so I don’t remember the correct terms, and this could possibly be very, very wrong. So, please correct me if I’m wrong.
The Albigensians thought reproduction was evil, as was hinted on in the article when it mentioned that someone would not be confused with a Albigensian if they were married.
There were two classes of people- the “elites” and the “common” people (not the real terms.) The elites were like priests and never engaged in any sexual activity. The common Albigensians engaged in any kind of sexual activity as long as it could not result in pregnancy. They may have done much worse things than just have crazy theological beliefs and commit fornication and sodomy, but I am not sure.
It was said that there was a stark parallel between how the Albigensian movement appealed to people then and how the modern/left movement appeals to people now. There were three groups of people they both appeal to, and I think they might have been like this:
1) The “elite” Albigensians who deprived themselves of physical pleasure and were considered “elite” in their day are like today’s liberal elites who do things like become vegetarian.
2) The “common” people are just like the people today who want no sexual rules and want to indulge in their hedonistic pleasures.
3) The, for lack of a better term, overly-rational people were also attracted to the Albigensians sort of like the rational atheists on the left today.
This is all off the top of my head and may be totally wrong.
If so, I’d kindly ask any of you or anyone else to correct me.
WPaCon:
A common denominator of all Gnostic related heresies is the doctrine that “all matter is evil”. Thus, the Incarnation was a false and the Catholic Church for teaching that was, from the Cathars point of view, an agent of evil. Sacraments were evil because they used “Matter” [bread, wine, water, oil] and as you noted, Marriage was evil because it involved the sexual union of man and woman which. which involved the union of two evil things, the male and female body, which produced offspring, i.e. humans who are now trapped in a human body which results another evil body. Also, as you noted, food products like Milk, which of course was the result of a sexual union between say a Bull and a Cow or male and female goat, and food such as meat were also evil and Cathars were forbidden to eat them. So, yes, in the context of a 12th century Western Europe, which by that time was united in its orthdox Christian belief, a religous system proposed by the Cathars was seen as evil and a threat to the state and social order and a direct attack on the Catholic Church and Rome which of course did not deny the Incarnation, celebrated the sacraments of which marriage was among them.
While the Albingensian crusade did not start until 1209, after the murder of the Papal Legate [Peter of Castlenau], who was sent by the Pope to once again try to preach the orthodox faith to the Cathars and bring them back to unity of the Church, it should be noted [as Belloc notes] that going back to the writings of a young priest named Everwin who wrote to St. Benard of Claivaux in 1143 and all historians agree this is the first time in hisory we hear about the Cathars and by 1163, we know of written sermons being preached against the Cathars as evidenced by a priest named Eckbert of Schoau. Later, in 1207 we see a young Augustinian monk named Domenic, some Cistercians and a Bishop Diego of Spain began preaching against the Cathars trying to convert them back but after the murder of the Papal Legate, Pope Innocent III then allied himself with the French kings in the North and then the crusade began but in reality the crusades never by themselves won the Cathars over, because even the Catholic Kings aligned against the Cathars fought among themselves [Simon of Montfort vs. Raymond VI, who earlier had supported the Cathars] for who would control the Cathar region of France. Ultimately, it was not the war alone, but the preaching of preaching and life of the Domenicans and Francisans that ended the Cathar heresy.
Regards