were a Catholic order of fighting monks. They were destroyed by a money hungry King Phillip IV of France, who strong-armed Clement V (who had moved the papacy to France to avoid Italian politics) into disbanding them. In fact, recent scholarship has shown both that Clement actually absolved them of wrong doing, and that outside of France many secular authorities put the Templars on trial in order to demonstrate that the charges were false. In any case, they do not belong on a list of groups targeted by the church as heretical.

But the Templars were also tried for blasphemy and perversion, to which some confessed, although under torture. As I understand it, little is known for sure about the Templar initiation rite, but it involved both secrecy and some kind of, shall we say, nonstandard ritual. (It was alleged that the initiate was required to spit on a crucifix.) Rumors of homosexual practice swirled around the order almost from its founding--possibly started by its famous emblem, which showed two poor knights riding the same horse, their bodies pressed together.

You were making sense right up until your last, incongruous sentence. How do you justify your assertion that the Knights Templar were not targeted by the Church? Is it your intent to separate the King and the Pope as if their positions were totally unrelated? That is absurd.

I could abide an argument that the Church was more interested in the Templar's cash reserves than in their rumored allegiance to John the Baptist -- but you can't just arbitrarily absolve the Church of any involvement in Black Friday.

The church was not interested in their cash reserves, the king of France was. Clement V had (stupidly in my opinion) traded messy Roman/Italian politics for French politics by relocating the papacy to France. There he was under the almost direct control of the King of France, Philip IV. Philip used rumors about what happened during the Templar initiation ceremony (which was no more heretical than any other initiation into a regular order) and other rumors about general Templar behavior to accuse the Templars of sodomy and heresy.

In 1307 Clement acquiesced to Philip and issued a bull requiring the Templars to be investigated for these charges and allowing the monarchs of Europe to seize their property. In 1308, he absolved the Templars of heresy. As I noted above, in most countries outside of France, the trials of the Templars were constructed in such a way that they could prove their innocence. In France, the Templars were tortured into confessing, but later recanted their confessions (a usual requirement of the inquisition was that in order for a confession obtained under duress to be valid, it had to be ratified later when the victim was not being tortured). The French Templars also were attempting to mount legal defenses. Because King Philip IV had gotten tired of the legal proceedings, he took matters into his own hands and had many of the French Templars burned at the stake.

In 1312 (four years after he had absolved them) Clement V formally dissolved the order, because Philip was threatening to use his military power to do it himself. At this point the Templars were officially combined with the Hospitallers, although individual Templars may have fled. In Portugal the order continued to exist as the Order of Christ.

My basic point is that the actions taken by "the church" in this matter were all at the instigation of King Philip IV, allegations of heresy were not widely believed outside of France, in fact discredited outside of France, officially not believed even by the church (see Clement's absolution), and the whole thing was a secular bid to take advantage of their wealth and power. Contrast this to the Albigensian Crusade, in which the church declared an official crusade against the Cathars in southern France. Here, the church absolutely considered the Cathars heretics, and wanted them wiped out. The northern French nobility used this as an excellent excuse to wipe out the southern French nobility, but in this case it was secular leaders taking advantage of a church sanctioned crusade, not the church being forced to aid them in it.

The hobbits were not related to orcs. The elf king chose to anoint hobbits as part of the fellowship- he was not interested in their riches. The riches of the region were held by the dwarves.

And the dwarves delved too deep in Moria and awakened an ancient abomination of Morgoth, a Balrog. But wasn't it the legend of Isis who the virgin birth story was stolen from?