Voluntary Human Extinction Movement

Notice that none of them are taking the first essential step and offing themselves, a move that would do more to improve the environment than any of their suggestions.

I wish the highest degree of success for those who choose to participate.

If every Leftist would choose not to reproduce, the world would be less angry, more productive.

They could speed things up a bit by establishing “Going Home” centers and convincing people they shoul “Go Home” a la “Soylent Green”.

The Albigensian (Cathar) heretics of 13th century Occitania and Languedoc (NW Italy, southern France and the present day Catalan province of Spain) believed in the heretical doctrine that the human body and all material things are evil, and that one must escape from the body in order to be holy. They taught that the principal sin was procreation, since it entrapped more good souls in evil bodies; on the other hand, they hailed as the highest virtue, voluntary death by the refusal of food and drink.
They hoped for the entire extinction of the human race. What a horrible group.

They were pretty much defeated by the Cathar Crusade of the 13th century, which was, on the other hand, a horrible thing in itself.

Your summation of Cathar beliefs is just a tad biased, incomplete and unfair.

Just a tad.

But hey, the Church slaughtered every last one of them, man woman and child, over a million of them hunted down like dogs for over twenty years, so there's the good news. Nothing like having the moral high ground, eh? Job well done - after all somebody had to take out the trash. At least the nasty buggers aren't around anymore to tell their side of the story.

they believed in killing off the human race and themselves and yet there were more than a million of them??

hypocrites all!

:p

There's a great deal more that could be said of the Cathars, who could in some ways be sympathetic. However they did preach this radical dualistic heresy, which entailed their belief that the material world is evil, created by an evil god, and the human body evil beyond all things. The Anti-Cathar Crusade was a horrible crime, practically a genocide --- as I said before --- the Papal allies in no way had any high moral ground. Everybody acknowledges that.

Even -- or so it seems --- Pope Innocent III. The day he died in Rome, he appeared to the Abbess Lutgarda in Belgium in flames, and begged her and her nuns to pray for him, since, because of "three crimes", he would have to stay in Purgatory until the end of time.

There's a great deal more that could be said of the Cathars, who could in some ways be sympathetic. However they did preach this radical dualistic heresy, which entailed their belief that the material world is evil, created by an evil god, and the human body evil beyond all things. The Anti-Cathar Crusade was a horrible crime, practically a genocide --- as I said before --- the Papal allies in no way had any high moral ground. Everybody acknowledges that. Even -- or so it seems --- Pope Innocent III. The day he died in Rome, he appeared to the Abbess Lutgarda in Belgium in flames, and begged her and her nuns to pray for him, since, because of "three crimes", he would have to stay in Purgatory until the end of time.

At the very least, (and to end this particular spiral away from the point of the thread), I will just note that the Cathars saw the body and this world as evil because it separated a person from the experience of God. And that, far from "radical," the belief in a fundamental duality goes back far into the history of the world, such as in the theory of yin-yang in China or the study of duality by the Greeks. Which is why the other side of the coin must be equally emphasized here, that the Cathars also believed in a loving God as well.

And they had such strong faith in the protection of that loving God that they often went to their deaths, burned alive en masse, singing psalms, forgiving their murderers, and with peaceful composure. Even their murderers were shaken by their composure and wrote about it. Of course, they wrote that this was a sure sign of the devil, to try to shake the faith of the Holy Warriors.

But I believe that's all just a cover story for why they were massacred. The bottom line is that the Cathars rejected the need for an intermediary - they fundamentally rejected the priesthood. And so, the Church could not allow that. Cathars also had spiritual preceptors, like counselors, who were also male and female - so zing, another reason for the axe.

Such a waste, such a horror. And so foolish - for we all die. And in the end, we all face God alone. That will never change. It is the great equalizer, and it is inescapable.