Wim:
> You wrote 31/10 12:32 -0000 in response to "my criticism on a
> tradition employing priests to interpret God's will, thereby
> disempowering the other believers":
Sam:
> "Do you believe that primary school teachers disempower their
> students? Secondary school teachers? University teachers? At
> which point does a teacher become something disempowering? (I
> would say: when the teacher doesn't realize that he or she
> doesn't have anything further to teach, and becomes a static
> block). ...
The Cathar heresy, repression and inquisition was primarily about this very
matter. In the 12th and 13th centuries (at the least), the Catholic clergy
had become profoundly corrupt. It imposed special religious taxes and
enforced them by excommunicating those who wouldn't pay, thus, in the belief
system they espoused, damning the excommunicants to hell and isolating them
socially. The clergy also could demand lodging and food, and fees for
providing religious services that were, again according to the belief system
they spread, necessary for a moral life: marriage, last rites, funerals,
baptisms, etc. The clergy asserted that only they could absolve people of
sin, convey the blessings of god, and mediate the effectiveness of prayer --
all for a fee.
The Cathars pronounced that all these religious rites and services could be
carried out by ordinary people without the help of clergy. At a time books
were few and revered, lay Cathars asserted that they did not need priests to
interpret the bible. Cathars opposed the church taxes and denounced the
church as corrupt.
The crusade against the Cathars went through several stages. The first was
that the Vatican conspired with the king of France -- then restricted to the
Ile St. Louis region -- to attack (via the first 'crusade' to be launched
against christian people) the lords of the regions of Toulouse and Albi,
etc. With the political power in the area destroyed, the Vatican then set up
the Cathar Inquisition to rout Cathar beliefs, pronouncing them 'heretical.'
After many decades of harassment, arrests, lengthy interrogations,
indefinite imprisonment, property seisures, executions by burning and lesser
punishments, Cathar beliefs were pronounced by the Catholic church to be
eradicated, but not after mass resistence by a number of Cathar villages, in
which dozens and in a couple of cases hundreds of Cathars chose suicide
rather than submission.
Sam's description of teachers becoming disempowering when they have nothing
more to teach rings partially true, but in the case of the Cathars the
Catholic inquisitors would have asserted vigourously that their teachings
had just begun... How do we determine whether a teacher has indoctrinated
him/herslf past the point of usefulness, and to a point where they have
indeed become disempowering?
Lawry
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