OK, so I searched for -- Talisker Albigensians -- (which gets, BTW, 702 results on Google, but most of it is whisky: how the Albis got in there is a puzzle) and finally read through about 20 minutes' worth of exchanges narrowed down to Talkisker on FR. That was only a slice of a much bigger dialogue, I know. But what I read, was back-and-forth between you and dangus and various others (I pinged dangus because of the courtesy-ping rule) where
I am not going to risk my eyesight or my default position of good will (towards you, too, Talisker) by reading more pages of this stuff. It unscrolls wearyingly through many different threads starting out with Biblical canon, Innocent III, Lutheranism, Dominic, Tyndale, Frenchmen, friars, and ending up, always, with the atrocity at Beziers.
My impression is that saying "Albigensians" is one way of playing the Hitler card.
I repeat, that was only a slice of a much bigger dialogue, I know. But the pattern was, somebody objects to the anti-sex, or antinomian, or anarchist doctrines of the Albis, and you intepret this as support for genocide.
If that's the case --- and as I said (3x) I realize I'm dealing with fragments here --- then it's not fair. Objecting to some group's doctrines, whether they be anti-sex or anti-king or anti-Christ Our Lord, is not the same as justifying decades of slaughter.
If I missed the part where some FReeper Catholic said the indiscriminate targeting of a civilian population is OK, please get back to me with the link/quote. I will promptly go over and do some remedial catechism on them, good and hard.
Thank you.
P.S. You might be intrigued to know that on the day Pope Innocent III died at Rome, he appeared, in flames, to the Abbess St. Lutgarda in her monastery in Belgium. He said he had committed crimes which had merited his being in purgatory until the end of time, unless the copious prayers of merciful Christians served to appease the justice of God and mitigate his sentence.
He may still be sizzling, for all we know. It'd take a po'ful heap of prayers to get a reduced sentence on a verdict like that, I reckon. (It wasn't hell, though. Hell continues for eternity, after the end of time.) So that may show why, in the eyes of the Church, Lutgarda is regarded as a canonized saint, and Innocent is... ahem... not.
Actually, "the pattern" was that the "much bigger dialogue" was the defense of the mass murders through the invocation of "heresy." And the defense of the charge of heresy was through the invocation of what were claimed to be "anti-sex, or antinomian, or anarchist doctrines," but which could only be made by throwing context and deeper Cathar teachings to the wind.
Which always bemuses me, because the Catholics of the day wanted it both ways against the Cathars - they denied they were Christians, and at the same time accused them of heresy, a charge which can only be made against Christians. Because, of course, the Cathars never claimed to be Christians but acknowledged Jesus Christ and had a different interpretation of His teachings.
So if you want to invoke modern times to that situation, it is a direct match: what ISIL is doing in Iraq is exactly what the Church did to the Cathars in southern France. And for the same reasons - a different take on the same religious founder. Because you'll note that while ISIL kills whatever Christians come their way, they are overwhelmingly and mainly and openly targeting Muslims, with the goal of creating one world Islamic caliphate. Which is, of course, the real reason the Pope wiped out the Cathars - so there would be one world-spanning Christianity overseen by the Catholic Church - and no one and nothing else would be left alive to invoke Jesus. And that is EXACTLY the goal of ISIL concerning Mohammed.
So that's your real comparison to the Cathars. And in helping stop it today, Pope Francis is directly mitigating some of the terrible sin the Church committed so long ago, and I applaud him for it.
That he obviously intends it to support justification for a UN military, I'm not so pleased about. But then, roses always come with thorns.