Real Muslims of Iraq.

Professional skeptics though we are, we think Osama bin Laden really is dead.

The American people, who paid for the raid by the SEALs who carried out the glorious act of revenge for them by killing him, should have been shown the corpse. As it was hastily disposed of (or so we’ve been told), they should be shown the photos of it.

But the president has decided we may not see them.

Does the president really have that power? If so, why?

And why should we not see the pictures of the corpse of the man who plotted 9/11? Is Obama afraid that some might gloat over them? (We would.)

And why have we been told lie after lie about the SEALs’ raid on his compound?

Michelle Malkin, a reliable provider of sound information and intelligent analysis, sets out the lies-thus-far, writing at Townhall:

Take One: Bin Laden died in a bloody firefight. …

Take Two: Bin Laden did not engage in a firefight. …

Take Three: Bin Laden’s wife died after her feckless husband used her as a human shield.

Take Four: Bin Laden’s wife did not die, wasn’t used as a human shield and was only shot in the leg. Someone else’s wife was killed, somewhere else in the house.

Take Five: A transport helicopter experienced “mechanical failure” and was forced to make a hard landing during the mission.

Take Six: A top-secret helicopter clipped the bin Laden compound wall, crashed and was purposely exploded after the mission to prevent our enemies from learning more about it.

Take Seven: The bin Laden photos would be released to the world as proof positive of his death.

Take Eight: The bin Laden photos would not be released to the world because no one needs proof …

Take Nine: Bin Laden’s compound was a lavish mansion.

Take Ten: Bin Laden’s compound was a glorified pigsty.

Take Eleven: Bin Laden’s compound had absolutely no television, phone or computer access.

Take Twelve: Bin Laden’s compound was stocked with hard drives, thumb drives, DVDs and computers galore.

Take Thirteen: Er, remember that statement about bin Laden being armed? And then not armed? Well, the new version is that he had an AK-47 “nearby.”

Take Fourteen: A gung-ho Obama spearheaded the “gutsy” mission.

Take Fifteen: A reluctant Obama dithered for 16 hours before being persuaded by CIA Director Leon Panetta.

Take Sixteen: Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and close advisers watched the raid unfold in real time … and a gripping insider photo was posted immediately by the White House on the Flickr picture-sharing website for all to see.

Take Seventeen: Er, they weren’t really watching real-time video “minute by minute” because there was at least nearly a half-hour that they “didn’t know just exactly what was going on,” Panetta clarified. Or rather, un-clarified.

Take Eighteen: Stalwart Obama’s order was to kill, not capture, bin Laden.

Take Nineteen: Sensitive Obama’s order was to kill or capture — and that’s why the SEAL team gave him a chance to surrender, upon which he resisted with arms, or actually didn’t resist with arms, but sort of resisted without arms, except there was an AK-47 nearby, sort of, or maybe not, thus making it possible to assert that while Decisive Obama did tell the SEALs to kill bin Laden and should claim all credit for doing so, Progressive Obama can also be absolved by bleeding hearts because of the painstakingly concocted post facto possibility that bin Laden somehow threatened our military — telepathically or something — before being taken out.

Take Twenty: “We’ve been as forthcoming with facts as we can be,” said an irritated [Jay] Carney [White House Press Secretary] on Wednesday.

So the SEALs, not Obama, made the decision to kill bin Laden.

Will Eric Holder’s Department of “Justice” now charge them with murder?

As everyone in the Western world ought to know by now, Islam is using stealth, as well as violent jihad, to Islamize the non-Muslim world.

Muslims have been admitted into Western countries in large numbers. European states invited them in. They are transforming the host nations into Islamic societies, and the host nations are helping them do it.

Dr Nicolai Sennels at Gates of Vienna sets out how the stealth method is conducted, “by three roads”. His information is not new, but it’s a useful reminder.

The word “Islamizaton” was originally coined by Muslims to describe the conversion of a kufr (infidel) society to an “enlightened” (Islamic) society. Islamization is a phenomenon that has existed since the Muslim prophet Mohammed lived 1,400 years ago. Islamization has been effective, since it is now the main religion in 57 countries. The association of Islamic countries, OIC [Organization of the Islamic Conference], is the world’s largest supra-national organization, surpassed only by the UN.

One road to Islamization is to remove non-Islamic traditions and symbols. This is to avoid offending Muslims or expose Muslims to proselytizing by other faiths. It also aims to reduce competition from the country’s original religion and culture in order to improve the possibilities for further Islamization. An example is the Red Cross’ refusal to decorate for Christmas in their stores, or when banks no longer hands out piggy banks to their customers’ kids (because pigs are unclean in Islam) — in both situations in order not to offend Muslims and lose Muslim customers.

Another way Islamization is accomplished is by making Islamic traditions and rules part of non-Islamic societies. Examples are reconstruction of public sports facilities to cater for Muslims’ inhibited views on nudity and contact between the sexes, or the imposition of leave on Islamic holidays.

A third way Islamization achieved happens when certain areas or neighborhoods acquire such a high a proportion of Muslims that the country’s indigenous culture and people are pushed out. One example is when non-Islamic authorities such as police and fire departments meet with disrespect and sometimes even threats and violence, while imams, patrolling police-style Muslim fathers’ groups, homemade Sharia Courts, and Islamic mediation meetings are free to exercise their power. Another example is when Jews can not wear yarmulke or girls can not wear miniskirts in Muslim-dominated areas, because they risk being attacked.

Islamization thus occurs through elimination of the indigenous culture, introduction of Islamic traditions and through immigration and the building of Muslim parallel societies. …

He gives examples of how Islamization is forced on Western societies in practice:

It is Islamization of our cities when entire neighborhoods are dominated so strongly by the Muslim culture, Islamic values, and Muslim racism that the country’s culture and the indigenous population no longer feel at home and safe in the area. We should feel at home and welcome everywhere in our own country.

It is Islamization [when we buy halal food]… [By doing so] we contribute to Islamic “charity”, which helps fund terrorists, and support Muslim jobs at the expense of non-Muslims and food prices — for halal slaughter requires a Muslim to assist with the slaughter, and Muslim organizations are paid to approve the procedure. …

It is Islamization of children’s schooling when the state allows and supports Islamic schools and madrassas. Primary schools are our society’s most important cultural carrier and are intended to inform schoolchildren of the country’s indigenous culture and values.

It is Islamization of our urban design and architectural culture when municipalities and the state permit the construction of large mosques and minarets. Arabic architecture does not belong in Western cities — and certainly not at very central, historical or visible locations.

It is Islamization of our country when mosques are permitted. The mosques enforce and increase Islamic values among the area’s Muslims and often function as a springboard for political activity that works for the Islamization of the country.

It is Islamization of our way of being together and of women when we allow burqas and the niqab in public spaces. In a democratic society, we should see each other’s faces, and women and men are equal and free to dress as they like.

It is Islamization of our public sports facilities when swimming pools and locker rooms are closed or reconstructed so that Muslims can use them. It should a person’s personal choice of what religion and what view of nudity he allows. Personal choices should not restrict the citizens’ access to public taxpayer-funded facilities.

It is Islamization of our schools, institutions, workplaces and the rhythm of the year when we create Muslim holidays and when municipalities and unions print Muslim holidays in our calendars. … The yearly rhythm is closely associated with a country’s history, traditions, and culture and plays an important role to our experience of holidays and seasons. This very basic rhythm of life should be experienced as being related to our own history and culture, and not be Islamized.

It is Islamization of our schools when Muslims are excused from physical education … for religious reasons.

It is Islamization of the stores when they choose not to use Christian, cultural or national symbols in order not to offend Muslims or losing Muslim customers. Shop decorations are part of our culture and our cities’ street scene, and help to mark the seasons with Christmas ornaments, Easter eggs, carnival decorations, etc. …

It is Islamization of our public institutions and workplaces when halal foods are included on the menu. Special diets due solely to personal choices of religion should not be funded by the state. …

It is Islamization when we ignore the fact that a specific ethnic group of women in our own country are deprived of basic human rights on religious grounds…. It is important that [im]migrant women know their rights to women’s shelters, divorce and repatriation.

It is Islamization … when public sector workplaces have prayer rooms. Public workers are public servants, and thus taxpayers’ money should not be used for religious practices.

It is the Islamization of our jurisprudence when we do not effectively stop homemade Sharia Courts and Islamic mediation meetings….  Such things are … a direct assault on the foundations of our social structure and sense of justice …

It is Islamization of the justice system when police ignore Muslims’ scorn, threats, and violence, and when the police invite Muslim fathers’ groups to help stop Muslim riots and gangs. It is harmful to the sense of justice in the country and undermines police authority.

It is the Islamization of our legal system when we allow Sharia courts or give reduced sentences to perpetrators who have committed a crime for religious or cultural reasons (honor crimes).

It is Islamization of our population, electorate, and country when we allow immigration from Muslim countries …

In Europe and in some states of the US, a few politicians are at last taking notice of stealth jihad and see it as a threat.

The Obama administration, however, does what it can to aid its advance. (See, for instance, our post The name of the change, April 14, 2011.)

The Second Industrial Revolution, the computer revolution, occurred because its inventors, entrepreneurs, venture-capitalists, its innovators and risk-takers and visionaries of all sorts were free. They had freedom of action, could use their time and resources as they chose. What they produced has benefited uncountable millions of other people. Their country, their world, and all generations to come, the whole human race, are the beneficiaries of their ideas and labors. They have enriched us all. If ever men have deserved to grow rich themselves, they have.

No government, no social program, no redistribution of wealth, no central planning, no high-tax-high-spend economic system, can do for the general good what they have done for it. They have created wealth. Governments diminish it. And redistributing governments, run by “social justice” liberals, destroy it.

Why can’t the very men who used freedom so well understand this? Why are so many of them helping to destroy that essential freedom of which they took splendid advantage, so that in future others cannot do what they did?

In an article at Front Page on business leaders toadying to Obama, Benjamin Shapiro considers the strange phenomenon of their self-destructive behavior:

On April 5, President Obama kicked off his newly-minted presidential campaign by announcing that he would be conducting a “Facebook town hall” event streaming live via the website and via the White House website on April 20. Just to ensure that the Facebook audience recognizes that this isn’t merely another media appearance but an endorsement of Obama by the Facebook executives, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg quizzed Obama before an audience of over 1,000 Facebook employees and other internet mavens.

The recorded result will be chopped up and distributed via Facebook and the White House website over the coming months. “We’re honored that President Obama will be visiting headquarters later this month and will be using the Facebook platform to communicate with an international audience,” Andrew Noyes, Facebook spokesman, gushed.

Obama isn’t the first politician to use Facebook as a fundraising platform. But he is the first politician to be granted the privileged insider status of visiting HQ to do so. Facebook has been one of Obama’s most important supporters over the past several years. And Facebook is hardly the only Silicon Valley organization backing Obama. Apple and Google have also become vocal supporters of the administration. Steve Jobs dined with Zuckerberg and Obama in February to discuss job creation; Google CEO Eric Schmidt was one of Obama’s earliest backers for the presidency; Chris Hughes, one of Facebook’s founders, became Obama’s internet czar in 2007. In fact, prior to the election of 2008, Schmidt toured the United States with Obama’s soon-to-be FCC Commissioner Julius Genachowski to stump for Obama’s net neutrality policies.

On the surface, this makes little sense. Obama’s policies have targeted businesses with remorseless cruelty, setting them up as villains in the class conflict Obama wishes to precipitate. Facebook, Apple, and Google are three of the most successful businesses of the 21st century. Yet all three seem to be mobilizing in favor of the Obama Administration.

That’s because all three must dance for their political master.

Because the federal government is so large and so powerful, and because President Obama is obviously willing and able to use government weight to press forward his agenda, major businesses in the United States must look to appease him. Obama has no problem wielding the heavy club of regulation to hurt his political enemies, or to help his political friends. Major businesses like Facebook, Google, and Apple have all felt the sour stings and warm embraces of big government. And all of them prefer the warm embraces.

President Obama has already promoted Facebook and Google openly: in his State of the Union address, for example, Obama stated, “We are the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook.” Obama’s net neutrality policy, which may or may not be backed by Google, would lock Google into place as the leading search engine on the internet – other search engines would not be able to pay internet service providers (ISPs) to make their websites run faster. Obama has promoted Apple publicly too, particularly [Steve] Jobs.

By the same token, Obama has also targeted each and every one of these businesses, making it clear that they had better get in line. Obama’s Justice Department has cracked down on Google Books, covertly threatening antitrust lawsuits. The DOJ has also pledged to shut down Google’s acquisition of ITA, a flight data and software company. Michelle Obama has said that Facebook is no place for children, and President Obama has stated that iPads and iPods threaten the republic, making “information … a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment … it is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy.”

Facebook’s, Google’s, and Apple’s flirtations with President Obama are just the latest example of how American businesses die. To be sure, Facebook, Google and Apple are a long way from death. But once they begin dancing to the tune of the government flute, it is only a matter of time before they become obsolete.

The growth of government – and the threat of government involvement in industry – has eventually crippled virtually every major industry in America over the past century and a half.  Businesses are started by entrepreneurs; when they grow successful, government intervenes to take its pound of flesh; entrepreneurs respond by parlaying with government, hamstringing their own businesses in an attempt to [appease] government wrath. Those businesses gradually become decrepit, dependent on the whims of the capricious Washington D.C. deities.  Overseas competitors begin to compete, and the now-slow-moving businesses require government subsidies to survive. This is how businesses turn from American assets into American sinkholes. …

James J. Hill, the man who built the Great Northern Railroad, derided government aid, explaining, “The government should not furnish capital to these companies, in addition to their enormous land subsidies, to enable them to conduct their business in competition with enterprises that have received no aid from the public treasury.”  … Hill started off as a grocery clerk, then worked in a variety of industries before pooling his cash with several partners to enter the world of the railroads.  His business model was a paradigm of pure capitalism.  Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting converted the railroad industry into a shell of its former self, and converted its “robber baron” leaders into public villains. Now today, President Obama tells us that we must publicly fund rail systems so as to compete with the Chinese.

In the oil industry, the Rockefellers of the early 20^th century gave way to the heavily regulated firms of today – and not coincidentally, the foreign oil dependence that now shapes our foreign and domestic politics.

In the automobile industry, Henry Ford entrepreneurialism gave way to government-supported unionization, subsidization, and finally, bankruptcy.

When President Obama praises the fact that we are “the nation that puts cars in driveways and computers in offices,” he neglects to mention that we are also the government that kills the car industry and ships the computer industry overseas; when he lionizes us as “the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers,” he ignores the fact that Edison has given way to government-sponsored GE, a company whose stock fluctuates with each presidential press conference; when he effervesces over Google and Facebook, he blithely overlooks the fact that his own intervention will help make those companies archaic before their time.

This is what liberalism does to industry.  It kills it.

How is it possible for such brilliant achievers to be played for chumps so easily?

The cartoon Mr Magoo never gets personally hurt, though he leaves wreckage behind him. The Magoos of business and industry cannot count on being so lucky. Obama wants to turn America into a socialist state. Socialism is the wrecker of freedom. Socialism is bad not only for the economy as a whole and so for all business and industry, but for every individual –

Except its ruling elite. So, you men of the great start-ups, of great ideas and great ability, maybe for you personally the way of Chris Hughes is the way to go: join the administration and help to wreck America.

And watch the admiration and gratitude of your country and the world, which you have now, change to anger, contempt, and unforgiving blame.

The US does not need oil as much as it needs lizards. It does not need food as much as it needs millions of tiny smelt fish. It does not need timber as much as it needs owls. In a choice between reptiles, fish, birds on the one hand and people on the other, the scaly and feathered creatures carry more weight. They will be chosen. Their value is unquestionably greater than the value of people. That is the wisdom of America’s ruling elite.

Iconoclasts – a growing demographic – are asking why.

“Why preserve any species if it’s in the way of human prosperity?” they ask.

In sum, their demands are: Let the lizards perish – some could be made into luggage and shoes. Let the smelt disappear – no one will even notice it’s  gone. Let owls vanish into eternal night. And let America flourish, let its citizens (except Environmentalists) have all the energy they need, and be well fed and well housed – and, they add as a generous concession, be free to keep some lizards, fish, and owls as pets if they want to.

The only answer they have had so far is from Professor Doctor Babs Monitor of the Faculty of Ecology, Department of Reptile Studies, Masoch University, Vienna, who said:

“Gaia the Earth Goddess put these creatures there, and made the human species to care for them. If we fail in that duty there is no further purpose to our lives.”

From Canada Free Press, by Greg Halvorson:

You can’t make this up. First, a Spotted Owl destroyed the timber industry of the Pacific Northwest, then a minnow turned the most productive agricultural land in the world into a dustbowl, and now, as energy prices spike and the economy sputters, they’re going after Texas with a scurrilous reptile.

Specifically, the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard. That’s the latest more-important-than-people critter being used to lock-up resources in the name of planet Earth. The drilling moratorium didn’t cause enough pain, so onto the Endangered Species Act – known at the Sierra Club as “Ol’ Reliable” – to make certain Texas has lizard-filled poverty.

Lizard or livelihood? That’s what’s at stake. And the pro-poverty Earth Firsters stratifying government can’t have both. If it determines that the lizard is indeed endangered, the Fish and Wildlife Service will shut down the most productive oil counties in Texas, ban roads, and slow farm activity, as it “studies the ecosystem” for up to five years.

Next in our occasional series on lost and obscure religions comes Catharism. (Our choice of which to write about and when depends to some extent on chronology, but also on whim.)

The name “Cathar” derives from the Greek word for “pure”: catharos.

The sect arose (not exclusively, but most memorably to history) in the Languedoc in southern France (the land where the word for “yes” is “oc”).  “Cathars” was the name bestowed upon them by the Catholic Church. They called themselves simply “Christians”, “Good Christians”, “Good Men” or “Good Women”. They were opposed to the Catholic Church as ardently as the Church was opposed to them.

The cult stemmed from the Balkans (see our post on the Bugomils, Hot in the land of Hum, October 14, 2010). Bugomil and Paulician missionaries brought it to Western Europe. And the Crusades had more than a little to do with the spread of eastern doctrines into the West.

In the Languedoc, the first Cathars were tradesmen and artisans, mostly weavers.  Nobility joined the sect later than townspeople and peasants.

Because the Catholic authorities believed that the town at the center of French Catharism was Albi – when in fact it had no center – they called Catharism “the Albigensian heresy”.

It was a form of Gnosticism. One typically Gnostic aspect of it was its discouragement of procreative copulation. Because of this, it has been conjectured by numerous historians that Courtly Love (love between a man and a woman which excluded sexual intercourse), a cult contemporaneous with Catharism and celebrated by the troubadours, arose directly out of it.

The Cathars were first recognized by the Catholic Church to be an organized heresy around the year 1030, but it wasn’t until 1208 that it sent an army to the Languedoc to wipe out Catharism. The campaign was called the Albigensian Crusade. The Cathars resisted, and the Catholic forces, under the command of Simon de Montfort, took decades to accomplish their aim.

Like the Manicheans (see our post, Mani and Manicheism, May 9, 2010 ) and their offshoots (including the Paulicians and Bugomils), the Cathars believed that Two Principles govern the universe: Good and Evil.

They identified the Jewish God, Jehovah, with the evil principle, the Devil. They also called him “The King of the World”.

There was a division among the Cathars into two main sub-sects: the Dualists and the Monarchists.

The Dualists, more closely adhering to the Iranian Gnosticism of Mani, believed that Evil is co-eternal with Good.

The Monarchists believed that evil came into being with the fall of an Angel who became the Evil God, and that he will be overcome, and evil destroyed, when the material world comes to an end.

The Dualists believed that the material world is entirely the work of the Evil God, the Monarchists that the Evil God created it out of material already existing. Some Monarchists held that the Evil God had the Good God’s permission to create it. All agreed that matter is evil; that the Evil God imprisoned man in his creation; that men and women are made of base matter, but each has a spark of divinity in him or her.

And all believed that between the Good God in his highest heaven and the lower world, are sequences of Aeons (for an explanation of which see our post, Valentinus, February 14, 2011). The chief of these is the Don, or Christ, who was sent in “a moral casing” to earth, to combat the Evil God and redeem all the sparks which belonged to, and originated from, the celestial sphere and return them to where they belonged.

They all believed that Christ had not been human. A divine being could not be clothed in such base matter as flesh, because it is evil.

The Dualists held that, therefore, the “Christ-Aeon”, being wholly divine, had only seemed to be crucified (a theory known as “docetism”).

The Monarchists, or at least some of them, believed that a few of the elements of which this world is made came from the Good God, so a divine being could enter matter, and seem to be human, in order to dupe the Devil and rescue the scattered fragments (or “sparks”) of the good.

The Virgin Mary was not important. To some she was an Aeon through whom the Christ-Aeon passed when descending. To others she was a mere woman whom Christ had used as a conduit for his emergence into this world. He entered her through her ear, and came out the same way.

This world is the Devil’s domain. It is Hell. The body will remain in this world, and if  a person lives sinfully, which is to say, too “materialistically” (ie comfortably), he (or she) becomes ever more entangled in matter, too bound to the earth for the spark within him to escape. He will live other lives on this earth, perhaps in the form of an animal. Any animal may be a reincarnated human being with a holy spark in it, and this was a reason why meat-eating was forbidden.

To bring new life into the world by having a child was  to embed oneself very deeply in this Hell. So the Cathars deplored marriage and reproduction.

Sexual intercourse was strongly discouraged, and this in itself was a heresy in the eyes of the Catholic Church. The Church alleged that the Cathars did not live chastely, however, but indulged in forms of sexual activity that did not carry the risk of reproduction. The Church Fathers had accused Gnostic sects of the second century, which had been against child-bearing for the same reason, of holding orgies in which they indulged in perverse sexual practices. But orgies among the Cathars would seem to be inconsistent with their rejection of pleasure.

They were extreme puritans, but they did not refuse all sexual activity. They used  various forms of contraception, and may have gone in for pregnancy-avoiding sexual practices such as the Bugomils did. Consistently with their beliefs, they admitted that casual debauchery was preferable to marriage, as marriage regularized the practice of sexual intercourse.

Life on earth, they believed, was to be endured because it is the state in which purification must be accomplished. A Cathar’s ideal life was  lived chastely, abstemiously. He practiced self-denial, eschewed pleasure. The purer the life he led, the more his spark of the divine was likely to ascend to the celestial sphere when he died.

Like many Gnostic cults before them, the Cathars recognized three grades of human beings.

The bulk of mankind were Hylics, of the earth earthy, strongly bound to this evil  material world.

Among Cathars, the elect of the human race, the faithful fell into two grades.  The Psychics, also called the Believers, and the Pneumatics, also called the Perfects.

From among the Perfects were selected a Bishop, a Filius Major, a Filius Minor, and Deacons to serve and assist them.

The Cathar ritual of worship was simple. They had no churches. Daily, in a house of one of the faithful, they would gather round a table. Bread and wine were blessed by the most senior Perfect or Believer present. (This had nothing to do with the Catholic rite of the Eucharist, which the Cathars abominated.) All then said the Lord’s Prayer, standing. Then they seated themselves and the bread and wine were distributed among them.

Entrance to the sect was through a rite called the Covenenza.  The candidate undertook (made a covenant) to honor and serve the Perfects.  From then on he was eligible for the next rite, the Consolamentum, which wiped out all sin and by which he would become a Perfect.

A prolonged fast prepared the candidate for the Consolamentum, or Baptism of the Holy Spirit.  At the ceremony he promised never again to eat meat, eggs, cheese or “any food except from water (so fish were allowed) and wood (plants)”.  He promised never to lie, or to make oaths, or carry out any lustful act. He would remain completely celibate.  And he promised never to “go about alone” when he could “have a companion”, and never to denounce or abandon the faith for fear of water or fire or any other form of torture and death.

Then the witnesses and the postulant would kneel, and the ministrant would place the St John Gospel on the postulant’s head and recite its opening verses.

The new Perfect was then invested with a sacred “thread” which he had to wear for the rest of his life (a tradition descended from the Manicheans, who had received it from Zoroastrianism). The thread or cord was tied round the body, probably as a symbol of carnal restraint.

The ceremony ended with the Kiss of Peace. The men would kiss each other, and the women would kiss each other. As they were forbidden to kiss a member of the opposite sex, the men touched the women on the elbow.

A final rite was called the Endura.  He who submitted  himself to it could choose to become a Confessor or a Martyr. If he chose to be a Confessor, he would neither eat nor drink for three days. If he chose to  be a Martyr, he would never take food or drink again, but fast and thirst to death.  So long drawn out and intense would the agony of this be, that the Martyr was permitted to cut his life short by other means. And it was considered a kindness if someone close to the dying Martyr killed him. Both suicide and euthanasia were morally acceptable in that circumstance.

The Cathars held out against the Crusaders until 1244.  (Simon de Montfort was killed in battle at Toulouse in 1218 – his head shattered by a stone flung from a piece of artillery called a stone-gun, worked by a group of Cathar women.) The Cathars’ last stand was on Montsegur, a great rock of a mountain, where they were embattled and besieged. There they held out for ten months, but finally surrendered. Most of the survivors agreed to abjure their faith and embrace Catholicism, and had their lives spared. Three or four Perfects escaped. But the rest, about two hundred men and women, chose martyrdom and were burnt to death en masse, on a huge pyre enclosed by a roughly erected palisade at the foot of the mountain.

It was to counter Catharism that the first inquisition was established by the Church in the Languedoc in 1184. As a permanent institution, the Inquisition became the torturing arm of the Catholic Church. From the 13^th century the Dominican Order was in charge of it. It still exists, though it no longer officially tortures people physically, or burns them to death. In the early 20^th century it was given the new name “Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office”, changed again in 1965 to “the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith”. In 1981, Joseph Ratzinger – the present Pope, Benedict XVI – became its Cardinal Prefect.