Verbal Restraints

I want you to be free, including free to dispute what I say. Having you follow your own heart-mind leading will, in the long run, make my world a better place and improve my opportunities to glorify Christ. So the ideal is that you are free to follow your heart so I can follow mine.

Because of how language is used in Western cultures, many people are under false mental constraints. I run into it all the time with people who imagine I am, or should be, on board with their agenda. It’s an agenda that comes packaged in a particular form of expression that has gotten so very predictable, in that it predictably calls for action without actually providing a full rationale. It assumes too much without establishing all the antecedent moral values. It’s a basic principle of propaganda that folks can be herded into action with push-button words and I’ve seen it all too often in other forms of abuse.

Don’t buy it. This doesn’t require you to get bogged down in semantic analysis. You can learn a good mental habit of spotting the key terms and phrases that are used to bludgeon the conscience. One of my favorites is the term “Freemason” or “Masonic” in the context of some secretive threat. While there is plenty of material seeking to define how the terms are used, even then you can spot efforts to foreclose investigation by the reader. I’m not going to offer a long and involved analysis here; I seek to introduce that habit of mind that catches an attempt to prevent you from thinking and understanding beyond some call to action against a vague threat, one that probably doesn’t exist. We have enough real threats.

So let me offer this much: The Freemasons are not monolithic. Their own leaders don’t consistently agree on key issues. The membership ranges all over the place, with a significant minority joining simply because it’s the easiest way to find clients for business, or simply to find leverage that opens other doors in our human existence. At the other extreme, there are some who treat it as their true religion and are committed on a level of genuine faith. Whether it represents some kind of multi-generational cult of world control at any time in the past, it hardly qualifies for that status now. It’s been watered down to the point it is just one more insider group filled with people who have conflicting loyalties to other insider groups. There was a time a bunch of Freemasons conspired to change the politics, including murder, arson and other forms of mayhem, but they are hardly so single-minded these days.

At the same time, you should never doubt that Freemasons will generally lie to outsiders about the nature of their organization and its activities. That’s just fundamental to a lot of human activity, and it’s wired into the nature of secret societies. We should allow them to have their say, but realize some portion of it will always be untrustworthy, simply because they’ve been caught too often in the past. They do not represent a moral force for good. Some things never change.

What should we think of all that noise about Albert Pike as a major figure in their heritage? Like a lot of other major figures connected to secret societies, the record of his life is filled with planted lies, while other critical elements have gone missing. I’ve yet to see any biographical material that I trust completely. And was he a “Satanist”? That’s another complication attached to the abuse of language. He was most likely a Manichean, a fellow who believed that some cosmic forces of good and evil were more or less in balance. He did not accept the association of “Lucifer” with “Satan” and was a Luciferian — that much is largely undisputed. Further, he was deep into the Scottish Rite, something generally separate from the Freemasons, if you want to be precise. The two are related and overlap in many ways, sometimes even in membership, but they aren’t the same thing. Still, you could find various local Freemason organizations using Albert Pike’s name on things like awards for accomplishments. Oh, and it’s almost certain his alleged letter to Mazzini is pure fiction, and that the supposed prediction of three world wars is based on fables concocted after WW2.

My point is that the whole thing is muddy and not reliable as a reference point. And just how different is the supposed “evil secrecy” from the conspiratorial tones of most of the stuff proposing to uncover the secrets? We really don’t need all that noise to identify things that aren’t part of Our Lord’s plans for us. Just learn to read your heart-mind back into your conscious awareness and God will lead you where you need to go for His glory. You can recognize sin by its fruit, a fruit that violates God’s moral character written into reality itself.