Then what made them so dangerous that they had to be biologically destroyed?
Even Jews were not subject to similar extermination at that time ~ just severe persecution and repression, but the Cathers were murdered on sight.
You wrote:
“So Cathers weren’t really Christians?”
No more than Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses, no. To be a Christian you must believe in an all powerful Christian God - the Trinity. The Cathars, however, were dualists.
“Then what made them so dangerous that they had to be biologically destroyed?”
Exactly their sectarianism and its evil practices: the endura, abhorence of oaths (in an oath bound society), abhorence of marriage (because marriage produced children and that meant, in their evil way of thinking, the trapping of a soul in an evil body of flesh), and most importantly their acts of murder and assassination. The Cathars were no more able to co-exist with Christians in a Christian Europe, than the Muslims are today with Europeans in a liberal, post-Christian one.
That’s all news to you, right?
Yeah, it helps to actually know what you’re talking about.
“Even Jews were not subject to similar extermination at that time ~ just severe persecution and repression, but the Cathers were murdered on sight.”
Nonsense. There was no way to murder them (even if that was desired - and it was not) on sight since they adeptly blended in with everyone else!
I suggest you read a few books:
If you want to learn about the Cathars (in English), you have to read the “two Malcolms”:
The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in Languedoc in the High Middle Ages, by Malcolm Barber (2000; a very good medieval historian).
The Cathars, by Malcolm Lambert. (1998)
Both books are available in relatively cheap paperback. So are these:
Strayer’s classic on the Albigensian Crusade. Google books has a large part of it online.
And the modern classic or classics on Catharism and the inquisition:
Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (which was a bestseller in France 30 years ago and uses extensive inquisition records to show how tangled the relations and deceitful the actions of the Cathars were).
Ladurie’s book is amazing. Yes, some of his theories are a bit of over reach perhaps, but the book is endlessly fascinating because he used the inquisition records to reconstruct the lives of Cathars. Once you read it, you’ll understand why the inquisition was believed to be necessary - and that is by no means Ladurie’s point. Pierre Clergue, the main personage in the story of Montaillou’s Cathar sect, after all, was a Catholic priest using his priesthood to hide his Albigensian activities!