this has been fascinating me lately.  as i understand it: the cathars were a catholic fringe group in 11th-13th century france who believed that the god of the old testament was actually the devil because he created this imperfect world and trapped our pure souls within it.  their god, the god of love, was all about the spirit and could only be reached without bodies – they may have encouraged suicide among their clergy, and the idea of reincarnation was like a curse for them, because what could be worse than being trapped in this imperfect flesh for another life cycle?  the pope launched an honest-to-goodness crusade against the cathars and wiped them off the map, mostly for political reasons but also because their position had some disturbing ramifications when applied to the jesus story – they thought jesus was pure spirit, and thus couldn’t have died and been reborn.  that would have been the last of it, but otto rahn, a gay twentieth-century german medievalist who was funded by the nazis, read what few documents remained as saying that the cathars had owned the holy grail, and spent much of his life searching their ruins for it and incidentally popularising their position.  he never found the grail, and the nazis were very disappointed, and then he very conveniently was found dead, of ‘exposure’ from going ‘out hiking’ one night.

if this seems dense, it’s because i find it endlessly fascinating and overwhelming.  the history of catholic splinter groups is not exactly taught in public school, but these people really believed, talked, practiced, and died.  all religions that survive today have gone through so many dialectical challenges that have shaped them into our current understanding; the concept of a crusade, for example, was shaped by the catholic church’s decision to use that strategy in quelling the cathars into something slightly different than it was before.  this is part of why i can’t understand people of any faith who are so certain that what they practice is exactly the right answer.