Identity of God. Cathar teachers and others associated with them pointed out the cruelty, rapacity and irascibility of the Jewish tribal mountain god described in the Old Testament. Anyone who read the it could see for themselves that he was indeed unjust, partisan, jealous, cruel, irrational and occasionally positively vicious. This was such an easy point to prove in a literate society that it must have contributed to the fact that the best Catholic preachers consistently lost in open debate with Cathar Parfaits. (Such embarrassment led the Roman Church Church to prohibit the circulation of the Old Testament among laymen. For ordinary people to read a bible, or even to possess one, would soon become a capital offense, and many proto-Protestants would be burned alive for it.)
The Trinity. Cathars recognised the Father as the good god, Jesus Christ as a divine phantom and the Holy Ghost as a created being inferior to God. They saw the Catholic Trinity, nowhere mentioned in the original version of the bible, as a blasphemous invention. It is a matter of fact that the doctrine of the Trinity was developed in the fourth century - it was refined by a series of Church Councils starting with the Council of Nicea in 325. (Incidentally it is known that a bogus passage was inserted into orthodox bibles to explicitly confirm the doctrine of the Trinity, In the Authorized Version, the First Epistle of John 5:7 refers to the Holy Trinity: "For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one". These words come from the Vulgate, but are not in any early Greek text.
Satan. Catholic theologians tend to regard dualist religions as un-Christian. This is arguable for the pure form of dualism which posits two co-equal and opposite gods, but the Cathars of the Languedoc were "mitigated dualists". They believed that the God of Darkness, the god of this world, was lesser than and subordinate to the Good God. Eventually the Good God, leading the armies of Light, would triumph over the lesser, evil God and his army of demons. If we identify the God of Darkness as Satan, then this is orthodox Catholic doctrine. The fact is that mainstream Christian Church, from which the Roman Church would later split off, adopted Manichaean ideas during the Dark Ages. In short, the Roman Church is itself a mitigated dualist religion.
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