Freemasonry is a Gnostic belief system. Gnosticism is a type of Babylonian Mystery religion, insiders having secret doctrines and rites, with the secrecy itself being the deal-killer before any other consideration. Babylonian Mystery Religions contravene what God has revealed about Himself and His will; and that includes God’s will that the Good News be freely taught. The village priest of Knock, Ireland, was due for a beating for preaching that Catholics could not join any secret society, even one fighting the British “Orange Men” Freemasons, when the tableaux-like apparition of St. John, St. Patrick and the Virgin Mary took place at the church short-circuited that threat. It is ours to say, “I have the pearl of great price and am eager to share it,” versus “I have a book, the Pearl of Great Price, or Doctrines & Covenants, or… and can only share it with insiders.” This is a type of censorship, a censorship of some great claimed goodness being withheld from the masses.
Cutesy handshakes? OK. But the fundament is inherently self-contradicting if not self-denigrating. If it’s so great, why not freely share it, bro? This denotes elitism, another contravention of God’s ways in the mystery of election. Election is the principle that says it is God Who decides who is or is not called; we have no assurance we are one of the elect short of crossing the threshhold of Heaven; and we work out our salvation in fear and trembling. The elitist obverse is to be born into a caste system where if part of the elite you get to beat Untouchables with a shoe, or work your way to the top in an upwardly-mobile caste system to become part of the self-defined elite.
Such Gnostic elitism is seen in the nominally “Catholic” group (twice condemned in their founder’s home country of Brazil) Tradition, Family & Property/TFP, that posits “the preferential option for the elite.” The elites for this group are both genetic, like Robert E. Lee, and scholastic, like the professorial founder. One may note God choses very unseemly people to be His elect, for example, forwarding a smelly
shepherd to be a prophet or king; or chosing a smelly
fisherman like Peter over the educated and urbane Judas Iscariot.
As to the German Lutheran church allowing Masonic rituals to be performed in their sanctuary, one may note that Luther’s sidekick, Melancthon, accused Luther of being a Gnostic and urged some greater degree of moderation. Melancthon himself was no Reformation slouch but softened, even Catholicized, what evolved into Lutheranism. Luther’s secret blessing of a bigamous marriage, citing the patriarchs did it, SOLA SCRIPTURA-wise shows he was secrecy-friendly. Elitism was certainly at play when his initial desire to convert Jews was rebuffed and turned into deadly disdain with persecution urged as voiced in his essay, “On the Jews and Their Lies,” popular with Hitler. Luther’s white rose (signifying a blameless life) with a cross seal was adopted by the Rosicrucians.
The Southern Baptist credo “Faith & Message” was revised to be less overt in accepting other revelation apart from the Bible, i.e., tenets of secret societies like the Knights of the Golden Circle or even the KKK. The anti-Catholic tenor of the Southern culture may be attributed to this core of Catholic-inimical secret societies, thought he Southern Baptists did duly apologize for the KKK thing. Blood oaths, to vow death rather than disclosure, are made before disclosures, an agreeing to sacrifice one’s self or allow one’s self to be killed rather than reveal what is actually unknown to the candidate at the time. A political parallel would be the vote for the Affordable Health Care Act without being able to read it first. That’s another tenet of Babylonian Mystery Religions, man sacrificed rather than accepting Christ’s salvific sacrifice to forgive sins, not declare one’s self blameless.
Apart from all that, the pass-through rate of Freemasonic charities in America anyway is generally low as their endeavors are quite pricey, like sponsoring circuses and so forth. Their hospitals are wonderful but St. Jude’s might be a better bang for the buck.
Freemasonry’s Colonel Albert Pike, whom I consider a war criminal in his torture of Union soldiers, is the only Confederate memorialized by a statue in Washington, D.C. I don’t know if that deserves a feh or a meh.
