Sounds like you are the subject matter expert so I will let you answer the rhetorical question you posed. I am sure there are alot of readers eager to read your.
Well, O.K. you’re from Texas** ess1113a** I understand from your intro post onto CAF, and you have mentioned Blue Lodge. Let us then look at what your state’s, Grand Lodge of Texas, A.F. and A.M.,
Monitor of the Lodge: Monitorial Instructions in the Three Degrees of Symbolic Masonry (Grand Lodge of Texas, 1982), pp. xiii-xiv has to say about the First Three Masonic Degrees. I’m not speaking here: I am quoting from your own Masonic Monitor and will let the reader, Catholic or not decide for his/herself. Here are the words written in the Monitor of your own state’s Lodge on the three Craft degrees. You laughed at what I can possibly know about Freemasonry so let’s let the esteemed Masonic Brethren who put all that study into Freemasonry tell you and me what the ceremonies and teachings of the Blue Lodge represent:
“These [Masonic teachings were] practiced from remote ages, in the ancient temples of many nations. Such ceremonies and their correlated teachings have sometimes been referred to as the
Mysteries of Masonry, with the same signification employed when one speaks of the ‘
Mysteries of the Magi’, the ‘
Mysteries of Osiris,’ the ‘Grecian Mysteries of Eleusis,’ and other kindred rites, practiced in the temples of initiation throughout the ancient world…
The presence in the modern Masonic system, of many of the emblems, symbols and allegories of the ancient Temples of Initiation, as well as certain rites performed therein, has persuaded the most learned among Masonic scholars to conclude that Masonry is of very ancient origin, and is, in some aspects, the modern successor of, and heir to, the sublime Mysteries of the Temple of Solomon, and of the the Temples of India, Chaldea, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, as well as the basic doctrines of the Essenes, Gnostics and other mystic Orders”
What a bunch of hokum but it’s dangerous hokem, as the vigor with which Masons defend the Brotherhood show.
Now, as above, in your own Lodge’s Writing I can see why it’s not big deal to use the Holy Gospels and the Bible to swear the oath for the Third Degree and the penalty: “binding myself, under no less penalty than that of having my body severed in two, my bowels taken from thence and burned to ashes, the ashes scattered before the four winds of heaven, that no remembrance might be had of so vile and wicked a wretch as I would be, should I ever, knowingly, violate this my Master Mason’s obligation. So help me God…”
First off why should God help you to honor such an anti-Christian oath and why bring the Holy Bible into the swearing of the oath into your non-Christian Temple. If the oath is a joke, then, ipso facto, the Holy Bible is a joke too in the Masonic Temple. But then again maybe the Holy Bible should be a joke or used as one in the Masonic Temple. After all, the people outside the Masonic Brotherhood are
profane. And don’t tell me the Masonic author who chose the specific word “Profane” to speak about the non-Masonic world was clueless as to what it meant. And in any event, in the first three degrees of Freemasonry a substitute word is used for God to top it off, with God’s true Omnific name to be revealed elsewhere.
As per my post previous, whatever you may personally feel or any other Mason, the Oaths given in Craft Masonry are blasphemous and for the Christian initiate they use the Bible and therefore Jesus Christ for force. Why not just bloody use the Egyptian Book of the Dead for the oath and the penalties? After all, as your own Masonic Monitor states, the pagan mysteries of Osiris and the other Mediterranean cults among many, many other sublime Mystery cults (i.e. pagan) provide the foundation and are precursors to Craft Freemasonry. And again, I’m not the one making the claim, your own Texas Masonic Lodge is!
