So... why did their dirty laundry need airing in public again?
Attention and sympathy obviously, but otherwise...?
These neo-Cathars have a religion of sin without forgiveness. Only the Pure enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Look we're drifting more secular and all that Great Awakening energy had to go somewhere. You want it back?
It might be better if that energy was funneled through religion. In the States at least there is no Church, just 100,000 different churches that helps limit the momentum this puritanism can use. We have thousands of years of history with religions attempting to establish Heaven on Earth, yet always failing, often spectacularly and with much bloodshed. And with each failing I believe the religions come to accept more and more the futility of such endeavors. Some attempts still get made, but with less enthusiasm and effect than before generally speaking.
With the secular attempts to establish Year 0 (or whatever they want to call their version of Heaven on Earth) they don’t have as long a history of failure to inform them of their futility. The secularists are quite adept at dismissing prior failures (“that wasn’t real communism” tried over in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Cuba, Nicaragua, Romania, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Albania, Yugoslavia, Angola, etc.), because apparently it takes humans thousands of years to abandon any kind of idealism that takes hold.
We have language and experience that lets most of us deal properly with religious cults. We have means to limit their damage, help members escape cults, know to treat them with caution. They can still do incredible damage, but Jim Jones was never going to take over the US with his lunacy. With secular cults, some of us are just now learning that such things exist, and we haven’t developed the tools and understanding to deal with secular cults.
The danger of secularism running amok like a maniac with scissors is not entirely new to us. Edmund Burke saw from the beginning that the French Revolution was going to end in a bloody disaster. But as a whole I think we’re behind the curve in dealing with secular cults compared to religious cults.