- CATHARI: the corner stone rejected 1

 "Jesus saith unto them, Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous (sic) in our eyes?"  King James Bible. Matthew 21-42 

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All or nothing, PeaceWorld or death

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Tout ou rien, Le monde paisible ou la mort

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WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
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- CATHARI, the corner stone rejected 1

42 Jesus saith unto them, Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous (sic) in our eyes? The Bible, King James Version, Matthew 21:42.

“In the beginning, our Creator gave all the races of mankind the same songs and the same drums to keep in touch with Him, to keep faith. But people kept forgetting. In the fullness of time, the spiritual traditions of all the peoples – they are the same – will be united again in a great gathering of their secret leaders, and they will gain power to remake the world.” Mohawk prophesy as told by Tom Porter, from The Great American Bathroom Book, Volume III, (don’t laugh, check them out),Stevens W. Anderson, Ed., Compact Classics, Inc., Salt Lake City, Utah, 1994, p. 439. 

Details of the Cathar religion are complex and poorly documented. According to ancient Manicheanism from which the Cathari faith emerged, an Evil Principle dominates the physical world and an equal Principle of Good seems to balance it out on a spiritual plane. Like oil and water in colloidal suspension, these principles interact in cosmic contention. Each newborn is a frail vessel animated by a spark of good and cast adrift in the black typhoon of evil. Any material object seems to be Satan’s instrument. 

Cathari priests were known as Perfecti. Male and female perfecti had separate but equal orders and disciplines: an unthinkable arrangement at that time in history. They elected promising young candidates into their collegium after a rigorous apprenticeship under an elder of the same gender. Those holy partners wandered the countryside in pairs. They rested at humble hostels deeded to their fellowship by grateful deathbed bequests. They needed these houses to secure a room in which to pray alone the Lord’s Prayer, in obedience to Jesus’ instruction in Matthew 6 of the Bible. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have needed private housing. Any barn corner, doorsill or trailside hut would have sufficed them. They were God’s tough guys. 

Imitating the life Christ prescribed in the Books of Matthew, Luke and elsewhere in the Bible, they abstained from power, swearing, lies, wealth, sex and all meat but fish. In obedience to His words, they never owned more than two coins, a cloak and pair of shoes at the same time.  

They loathed the cross for the naked torture rack it was, helped the laity with its chores and problems, nursed and gave counsel when invited to do so, and relied on the Lord’s Prayer and Jesus’ exact Words for spiritual sustenance. No dismissal or man-spoken substitution of His Word was accepted, unlike those our Christian churches indulge in routinely.

Lay people were known as Credentes (believers). They were free to marry and tend to their worldly business without interference from the collegium. They received the Consolamentum from Perfecti on their deathbed and accepted the Endura death fast to seal their conversion into Perfecti: a quicker, cleaner and less painful death than most “natural” ones in those days, as well as those even crueler (because needlessly prolonged) for those who agonize today. 

The Perfecti lived lives so holy, they were revered everywhere they went. Don’t ask me if I could imitate their saintly habits; I’d fail. I am no saint, never have been nor will be. I merely tried to guess the lost script of their Consolamentum. You’re welcome to the same guessing game.

See my chapter Hypothetical Consolamentum. 

Their collegium grew rich from grateful deathbed bequests, yet remained steadfast to Christ. According to documents of the Inquisition, many Perfecti gave themselves away during final torture sessions, by rejecting their tormentors’ invitation to swear or taint their soul otherwise. That might have spared them from being burned alive by weapon Christians. I doubt it; those human monsters were having too much fun. 

The Cathari heresy arose from the intersection of three historical phenomena, among others. 

The first dates back nearly two thousand years, when the Prophet Mani was crucified (!) by dominant Zoroastrian clergy (fire worshipers) in 276 CE. The Manichean creed spread from its Persian birthplace into Syria (another cradle of intellect) and from there into Central Europe, notably Bulgaria, where it turned into the Bogomil heresy around 900. The Christian Orthodox Byzantine Empire, and then the expanding Turk Empire (the ultimate expression of Islamic militarism) repressed it by 1396. While peaceful Manichean congregations submitted to military conquest and forced conversion by Christian Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim fanatics, a handful of adherents sought refuge in Italy and Southern France where they converted local Catholics disenchanted by the gross materialism that disgraced the Catholic clergy.

The second phenomenon arose prior to the European Crusades, between 1095 and the 1200s. In addition to countless personal transgressions by its priests, the Catholic Church failed in its two-hundred-year-long quest to initiate the Peace of God and the Truce of God in Europe, from 989 on. These social movements sought to forbid combat during the many holy days of the Christian calendar; to protect peasants, women, children, clergy and their property from combat; and finally, to institute church arbitration over political rivalries in order to bring their pitched battles to a halt. 

These efforts failed. Their priestly advocates were replaced by profit-seeking church leaders. Militant nobles were permitted their massacres without religious penalty, in exchange for lump sum payments to the Church, just as individual sinners could purchase exoneration of their sins. 

Many Christians looked for honest religion elsewhere, especially among the incorruptible Cathari. In essence, their heresy was one of the first and purest expressions of Protestantism. It was exterminated centuries before the Protestants’ ultimate triumph by churches more worldly and  better adapted to militarist profit-taking and historical survival: see Luther, Calvin, et al. 

Thirdly, Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade in 1095, to wrest the Promised Land back from Muslims. Actually, he sought to skim the armored cavalry banditry that had poisoned Europe since the Fall of Rome, and thrust that venomous scum into the heart of the alarming Islamic empire. He granted substantial benefits to Western warriors who swore to that endeavor, notably the remission of prior debts and sins. 

As they assembled from all over Europe in the Langue d’Oc (at that time, a semi-independent duchy in Southern France), they booked passage and purchased provisions and equipment for their Middle East adventure. Crusader survivors disembarked on their way back and pawned booty for handier cash to bring home. The vigor of this commerce turned the towns of the Langue d’Oc into the richest ones in Europe at the time. It was there that the Troubadour tradition began, along with the poetry of courtly love and noble chivalry. Faith and Learning thrived as European, Muslim, Jewish, Savian, Gnostic and other Learner polymaths, sages and mages brought rare texts to be copied, translated and studied.

All of it burned or disappeared.  Except for the Bible, Kabala and Zohar, rescued overseas, and the Tarot. I found nothing left of the Andalusian Sufism (like that from Persia). 

The Provençal nobility (another designation for this region, its language and elite) was worn down by massive military drafts and casualties during the Crusades, and by the growth of a prosperous merchant middle class centuries before it would reappear in the rest of Europe. Many local nobles (men and women) took up the Cathari religion and became Perfecti.  

The Pope was not amused when he was informed that most of his Catholic churches were empty (no longer profit centers) in the richest province of Europe, while humble Cathari were venerated everywhere they went. A few attempts failed at peaceful conversion. St. Bernard gave up. Urban II cast the poisoned barb of Crusader fury into the Langue d’Oc: one of the few times a Crusade was launched against a Catholic population (as against the Kingdom of Leon , the Hussites later on, and the siege of Zama?).

Since this was an existential struggle against heresy, a counter-intelligence agency had to be deployed to guide the Crusader army, hunt down the heretics, exterminate and replace them. The Franciscan and Dominican Orders were picked for this Gestapo. Their control of this Crusade would be the Inquisition’s trial run. Many bigot prototypes had evolved from almost every mass religion since the world’s religio-military psychohistory began. This was merely its latest, most vigorous and terrorist version.

A few more Learner chapters beg to be written:  

 A) institutional suppression of free thought in favor of a dogma adopted by psychopaths, their gatekeepers and pet boneheads of every stripe and creed from ancient times to modern ones.

B) Institutional mass terror as a substitute for religion or ideology: this simplification of reality the ultimate goal of weapon mentality, barring existential casualties and cultural shutdown (like an over-vigorous virus that kills its host).

C) The suppression of new intellectual findings long after they prove themselves valid. http://www.amasci.com/weird/vindac.html

D)…

What’s more, there doesn’t seem to be a religious way to achieve political justice, notwithstanding Liberation Theology and other half-baked attempts by clerical meliorists of every denomination to revive peace mentality without challenging the weapon version. There has never been in written history a government in a state of religious grace, a miraculous religion or an institution of permanent ethical validity. It did not matter how absolute the proclaimed power of a creed and its political companion: Jewish, Muslim, Protestant, Catholic, Buddhist, Hindu, Atheist or any other form before or since. 

Accusing them of forbidden human sacrifice, the elite authoritarians of Rome, who practiced religious mass sacrifice of gladiators and prisoners, exterminated their intellectual Nemesis, the Druids: anarchic, egalitarian and merit-based, the Celtic equivalents of the Hindu Brahman caste. Rome, Constantinople and Moscow, the third Rome; the three always fought the Druids for the soul of the West. Druids, Cathars, cosmopolitans: take your pick of victims.

Let’s say you and I disagreed about our respective definitions of God. You take your stand on point A along this line of reasoning, (for example, “God does not exist.”) In this example, I defend point B to the death, (“God is this clay figurine in my house altar.” Just kidding).  

Since God is infinite (or as close to it as we can imagine), the line of God-definition stretches out to infinity. As it stretches out, the gap between your point A and mine B shrinks to nothing and our two points tend to merge, no matter how distant and divergent they may appear to us.  

We use synapses of spritzing brain-fat to grasp our limited awareness of God, guttural human-meat grunts to convey it, and, to memorialize it, stylized ink stains on chewed-up and dried plant fiber, or digital pointillism on computer screens.  No wonder our words are equally valid and meaningless! We might as well all grunt the same noise – or write the exact opposite of what we just read – for all it might reveal about the perfection, omnipotence and infinity that is God. 

So everyone’s definition of God should be equally true and blessed by God — and equally false and cursedly inadequate. Millennial texts like the Bible, the Vedas and the Qran are printed confirmations and aide-memoirs of this perfect absurdity; atheism, its ultimate simplification (“Move on. There’s nothing to see here!”). No quarrel over such a haphazard topic should lead to additional violence.

Sure thing, buddy. Religious mumbo jumbo has always served to justify psychopath brutality. 

We suppose, perhaps mistakenly, that our prophets taught us different things (cults and practices in conflict with each other) with the same objective in mind: salvation. On the contrary, they taught us the same thing with different objectives in mind.

There were the lifelines of Christ and Mohammed, of other prophets and great seers, as well as famous names that drew massive attention from their latter-day fans and fellow reincarnators. Their eyes shone inward and outward with the charisma of many admirers (Napoleon, Cleopatra, many famous people who served as reincarnation destinations for their fans).  

Mohammed preached the best worldly preparation for rebirth (without knowing it: his was the supreme voice of God when mindlessly reciting His angel Gabriel’s Words, less so while adjudicating the worldly problems of his followers and opponents); Moses and Abraham, the Law of God on Earth; Buddha, desire, suffering and escape from them; Zoroaster, the intimate combat between Good and Evil, the energy of which energizes this universe. Whereas, Jesus preached how to escape from the material plane and save one’s soul. With that in mind, their parables become clear, not obscure; and mutually complementary rather than in conflict.

Jesus left many puzzling parables in the Bible. One of them (that of the Talents: Matthew 25-14) entrusts risk-taking coinage to each of us, His servants. The Lord intends that we manage our lives for the profit of souls rather than mere risk-reduction. As stunt doubles in this universal action feature, we’re here to take enormous risks. Safe mediocrity must be illusory to us since everything kills us in the end. In our mortality reside our glory and salvation.

Our Father realized that the mission impossible of personal salvation had turned into a cruel punishment for most of us. We were too weak to take the high road and never got enough help from the word of His Prophets. Over and over again, we missed sterling opportunities for personal salvation. With every reincarnation, our task became more difficult, not less so. 

So He sent us his Son to show us the ultimate way out: Himself, and the last acceptable prayer: the Lord’s.  

In the Old Testament Book of Exodus, God commanded that burnt sacrifice be offered to atone for personal sin. Then He rejected that, without offering a substitute, in the Book of Isaiah. In Matthew 6 of the New, Jesus replaced public worship in the temple with the Lord’s Prayer recited at home in solitude.

Christ’s disciples got it wrong; they got almost everything wrong, except for their simple love of Christ. He told them as much quite often.

IN FRENCH

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- CATHARI, the corner stone rejected 2