Pretty rigid thinking here, but why should
athiests be any different?
http://www.sullivan-county.com/id3/freemasons.htm
FREEMASONS -- FROM THE 700 CLUB TO ART BELL, AN
OBJECT OF CONSPIRACY THINKING
by Conrad Goeringer May,
1998
Americans love
conspiracies. From the early days of the republic to the latest Arbitron
ratings, we have demonstrated a dramatic penchant for fearing hidden
plots, cabals, secret agendas and cover-ups. Turn on the television set
and you can feast on a bacchanal of paranoia. Afternoon talk shows, when
not entertaining us with the pugilistic antics of Jerry Springer, remind
us that Satanic cabals, elaborate and powerful rings of child abductors
or some other threat to the civic order is loose upon the land. The
claims get a bit wilder as one edges into prime time. Chris Carter
dishes us a steady diet of paranormal angst in "The X-Files," or a
darker apocalyptic vision with his latest series, "Millennium." It may
be fiction, but what is to distinguish those scripts from the claims
echoing from "unsolved mysteries"-type programs which blend anecdotal
accounts of alien abductions, ghosts and government concealment with the
graphic imagery of the evening news? It is no wonder that surveys over
the last decade suggest that increasing numbers of us believe in the
existence of marauding sexual perverts from space, or the likelihood
that Uncle Sam is obscuring the existence of craft from other worlds at
a place in Nevada known as Area 51.
Such claims manifest
an incredible immunity to the truth, and Americans seem increasingly
unable (and uninformed) to critically question many of these accounts.
Part of this may be due to the fact that there ARE conspiracies, and
that we know this because conspiracies often do not succeed. Richard
Nixon and the White House Gang were flirting with a dangerous suborning
of the Constitution, and perhaps only the clumsiness of the Watergate
burglars in leaving a strip of duct tape on a door to be noticed by a
passing security guard, led to the unraveling of that would-be imperial
presidency. The fundamentals of the Iran-Contra debacle are well known,
and in autopsying the cold war and its aftermath, it is difficult to
ignore the fact that America's vast intelligence apparatus -- indeed,
even perhaps that of the Russians -- can best be described as "The
Armies of Ignorance."
"Ah," proclaims the conspiracy peddler.
"But those are only the ones you know about..." Proving the nonexistence
of a conspiracy is somewhat of a philosophical Iron Man contest which
few people are trained for, or willing to endure. And like those
description of Satan, conspiracy theories are legion. Fueled by
self-publishing, injected with pop-culture steroids on the internet,
accounts of conspiracy proliferate and spread like some sort of
electronic virus. Is there anything that isn't part of a cover-up?
Besides, this is the stuff of excitement. Conspiracy theories
often reflect a potent, albeit cumbersome attempt to impose some order
on a world which often does not make sense and which we do not
understand. Who wants to believe that Oswald might have been just plain
lucky that day in Dealey Plaza? Or that AIDS is really part of a natural
mutation process? There are no limits on how far these sorts of
suspicion can go, since one can continually question the very facts
which refute or contradict them.
The Masonic order, a fraternal
group founded in the eighteenth century in England, has often figured in
accounts of those who suggest that history is influenced, even
controlled, by secret cabals. As a result, Freemasons have often found
themselves outlawed in totalitarian societies. Masonic lodges were shut
down after the Russian revolution, and the group was banned by the Nazis
shortly after Adolph Hitler's rise to power. Its semi secret rituals,
passwords, and an exotic history which mainstream historians dispute,
has often proven to be tantalizing and fertile soil for all kinds of
speculation.
The first organized opposition to Freemasonry came, not surprisingly,
from the Roman Catholic Church. Papal Bulls, official declarations and
other pronouncements from the Vatican have condemned the order which
requires its members to have a belief in a supreme being, and takes an
eclectic and tolerant approach to the world's various religions. Some
say that the involvement of intellectuals, many of them with
anticlerical political and social philosophies, has contributed to the
belief that the Masons were a revolutionary group threatening the
stability of autocratic regimes and theocracies. Others feared the
Masonic ideals of religious toleration and the notion of political
liberty which percolated through 18th century culture through the
Enlightenment. Leading Enlightenment figures from Voltaire to D'Alambert
were initiated into the lodges, along with scientists, writers, and
freethinkers. Even some clergy joined, but the secrecy of the lodge
meetings, along with peculiar rituals prompted some -- especially in
Catholic countries -- to suspect what might be taking place under the
mantle of Masonry. In 1739, Pope Clement condemned the order, and even
into the twentieth century, the Vatican's Code of Canon Law prohibited
church followers from joining "Masonic sects or any other similar
associations which plot against the church."
In the United States, the first Masonic
circles began to appear in 1733; by the time of the American Revolution,
nearly 150 lodges existed throughout the colonies. Many masons were
active participants in the uprising, and the Masonic ideals of
tolerance, brotherhood and political liberty resonated in the
institutions, documents and even the symbols which soon came to define
the new American Republic. Historian James Billington noted that
Freemasonry was "a moral meritocracy -- implicitly subversive within any
static society based on a traditionalist hierarchy." Today, American
freemasonry represents nearly three-fourths of the total membership of
over 6 million.
As official religions were "disestablished" in
the new states of America, religious groups quickly saw Masonic order as
a threat to clerical authority and orthodoxy. When a secret society in
Bavaria, the Illuminati, were ostensibly exposed for plotting against
the civil and religious order, fears quickly spread to the new world.
Churchmen saw their own fate in the violent downfall of the "ancient
regime" in France. In the early republic's more conservative quarters,
particularly the Federalist politicians and Congregationalist religious
leaders, the Illuminati hysteria became virulent and contagious. Suspect
of democracy and the Enlightenment, the Congregationalists feared a mob
uprising which would overthrow their "Standing Order," the church-state
alliance of aristocrats and clergy. Alexander Hamilton proclaimed, "The
people! The people is a great beast!" By 1789, anti-Masonic and
anti-Illuminist tracts and books were circulating throughout the states.
The Rev. Jedediah Morse, a member of the Standing Order, promoted the
dubious claims in works such as John Robison's Proofs of a
Conspiracy, and the even more lurid opinions in the Abbe Barruel's
three volume treatise on the "anti-religious" conspiracy of Masonry,
Illuminism and Jacobinism. President Adams ended up proclaiming a day of
fasting and prayer for the new republic, and Rev. Morse warned his
audience at the New North Church in Boston...
"Secret and
systematic means have been adopted and pursued, with zeal and activity,
by wicked and artful men, in foreign countries, to undermine the
foundations of this Religion, and to overthrow its Altars... These
impious conspirators and philosophists have completely effected their
purposes in a large portion of Europe, and boast of their means of
accomplishing their plans in all parts of Christendom."
"So,
it is not surprising to see the Freemasons now appearing as the
latest villains in conspiracy scenarios involving everything from
an Atheistic one-world government, to a cover-up about The Face on
Mars." | Anti-Masonic hysteria erupted
again in 1821, when William Morgan, a Freemason who had threatened to
reveal the secrets and beliefs of the group, was allegedly kidnapped by
his fellows. An Anti-Masonic Party was formed, and by 1832 had grown
sufficiently powerful to nominate a candidate, attorney William Wirt,
for president. He was defeated by Andrew Jackson, a Freemason, but
incredibly Wirt himself was purportedly a member of the order as well.
Into the nineteenth century and beyond,
American Masonry became increasingly identified with political and
social elites; the order has counted among its members dozens of
presidents and other elected officials, as well as leading
industrialists, bankers, and economic movers-and-shakers. Whatever
revolutionary ideals the group once had have, at least in the United
States, been subsumed by the rise of what sociologist C. Wright Mills
termed "the power elite." Masonry is known today as primarily a
charitable institution and "country club" network, although it still
carries on the tradition of quasi-secret signs, rituals, and an
embellished history which, with considerable license, attempts to trace
the origins of the order back to ancient times.
None of this has
stopped the gnawing fear in some quarters of American society that
"something" dark and sinister was really going on inside of Masonic
lodges, that the antics of Shriners in miniature cars, the Order of the
Eastern Star cake sales, or the charity works of the fraternity were
simply camouflage for a political agenda in the service of Protestantism
or, later, perhaps the devil himself.
So, it is not surprising
to see the Freemasons now appearing as the latest villains in conspiracy
scenarios involving everything from an Atheistic one-world government,
to a cover-up about The Face on Mars. Pat Robertson, who never could
resist a good tale no matter how ill-founded, and Art Bell -- does he
really believe this stuff? -- have both pointed the finger of suspicion
at those staid Lodge dudes in recent days.
Robertson is no
amateur when it comes to, well, trying to scare the hell out of his
followers. A week of watching "The 700 Club" sends a polarized message
that while God "is working" to cure select medical maladies of some
viewers, from gastritis to pains in the limbs, the world is about to
careen out of control and into an abyss of the worst sort. Robertson
informs us that tornados, earthquakes, climatic conditions, plagues and
that all important spectre of nuclear confrontation in the Middle East
is a sure sign that we are in the "last days", flirting with apocalypse.
Before Jesus and Lucifer slug it out on the plains of Armageddon,
though, the faithful must endure the risk of the Great Tribulation.
Already, hidden cabals are at work with their devious plans to erode
American sovereignty and establish a One World government. For
Robertson, the cold war and a host of other subsequent geopolitical
events are just so much puppetry for the REAL masters lurking in such
nefarious organizations as the United Nations, the Bildeberger group, or
the Council on Foreign Relations.
Robertson's conspiracy
theories have led critics to charge that he has drunk deeply at the same
well waters as classical anti-semites who see a "Jewish plot" to control
the world. Professor Berndt Ostendorf, Chair of American Studies at the
University of Munich, says that the powerful American televangelist
peddles fear to his audience, and "is a deeply religious anti-Semite."
In a lecture to a college audience titled "Conspiracy Nation: The
Fundamentalist Thought of Pat Robertson," Ostendorf identified five key
areas which underpin his apocalyptic global view. They included:
- Fear of deviating from a core set of "Christian values."
- Fear of the possible decline of the United States as a global
power, and its replacement by an amorphous "world government" run by a
godless cabal.
- Fear of "Populist Centralism."
- Fear of multiculturalism
- Racism. Traditional ethnic targets might include Blacks or Jews,
but recently Robertson has targeted UFO believers (he feels that they
may qualify for the death penalty according to one report) and people
with AIDS.
While Robertson eschews the hard-edged rhetoric
of more extreme groups like the Christian Identity church or Aryan
Nations, his Christian Broadcasting Company recently took a swipe at
that old bugaboo of conspiracy paranoia, the Freemasons. On the Friday,
April 24, 1998 installment of "The 700 Club," a CBN reporter presented
the second of a three-part series titled "Secret Societies, Behind the
Mask of Freemasonry."
"What goes on behind those bricked and
shuttered windows? Why do men meet in private, wear costumes, and
conduct ancient rituals? Why are Masonic secrets protected by violent
blood oaths?"
Actually, the imagery of grown men conducting a
overblown version of a pre-adolescent Boy's Tree House ("no girls
allowed") is cause for a degree of curiosity, but I suspect that the
real answers to these queries are more prosaic and less flattering than
Mr. Robertson would care to believe, or indeed than most Freemasons
would choose to admit. But "Behind the Mask of Freemasonry" continued on
to quote a former Mason who told the audience, "The definition of a
cult, as I see it, would be any organization or group of people that
embraces any kind of teaching that's contrary to historic established
Christianity, according to the Word of God..."
How's that for
investigative reporting and analytical insight?
The gist of the
CBN piece was that Masonry teaches a kind of universal religion that
happens to tolerate faiths of the non-Christian variety. There is a fair
sprinkling of twisted argument as well, like the charge: "We should note
here that the very secret of Masonry makes it impossible for a
good-standing Mason to explain or defend the Lodge's practice in
details." And there's the admission that Freemasonry has had a
"tremendous influence on U.S. History," and some of the figures I'm sure
that Pat Robertson wouldn't want to denounce in public as devil
worshippers or one world government cabalists... guys like George
Washington.
The CBN piece wraps up with the claim of another
renegade Mason who "believes (that) the ultimate god of Freemasonry is
Lucifer -- Satan himself -- not only because Satan seeks worship, but
also... 'if Satan can keep you away from knowing Christ, that's the
key...'"
Fear of Masonic intrigue has appeared in another even
more unlikely place, the radio show of paranormal radio shock-jock Art
Bell. This, too, is a tangled tale which begins not in some Masonic
lodge (although it ties in...) but on Mars.
Start with a guy named Richard Hoagland,
science writer and author of a controversial book titled The
Monuments of Mars. Hoagland argues that photos from reconnaissance
missions to the Red Planet show an enormous artificial construction or
artifact in the shape of a face. Surrounding this, says Hoagland, is
evidence of other structures, a virtual Martian city from ancient times.
Most astronomers and NASA scientists were highly skeptical of this
claim, arguing that the "face" on the planet's Cydonia region was really
an artifact of a different sort, caused by geological features, shadows,
and a fair amount of anthropomorphic projection and imagination thrown
in for good measure. That didn't stop the buzz on the internet or in
numerous fanzines and UFO periodicals. So when probes such as the NASA
Global Survey and Pathfinder relayed new high resolution photographs of
the Martian surface, inquiring minds wanted to know; "what would we see
at the Cydonia area?"
For NASA, the skeptics, and science in
general, it was a no-win situation. If the Global Surveyor happened to
malfunction, a distinct possibility when you're launching delicate
equipment a few hundred million miles into space, the conspiracy buffs
might argue -- as they had suggested at the fate of a Russian probe --
that it was destroyed so that no evidence of extraterrestrial
civilization would be revealed. (Why send the probe in the first place?
we might ask.) There was the possibility that Global Surveyor just might
confirm the existence of the "Face on Mars," and much more. And there
was the probability that the "face" would be just what photo
interpretation and other evidence had earlier suggested -- light and
shadows, illusion and imagination.
When the pictures of Mars
from began streaming in, Art Bell's late evening talk show "became
Conspiracy Central for the view that NASA was somehow still covering up
the existing of an ancient civilization in the planet's Cydonia region,"
noted Art Levine in a special dispatch posted to MSNBC. An anonymous
caller to the program who would only identify himself as "Kent Smith"
said that during his tenure at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) he
had accidentally seen photos of the mysterious face, along with other
compelling evidence of cover-up such as a picture of giant pyramids and
a "building minus a roof and with one of the walls knocked out."
Art
Bell | According to Levine, Hoagland and
Bell set out to try and verify "Kent Smith's" incredible story. One
technique involved "reverse speech" analysis that claims to be able to
uncover phrases and words imbedded in everyday talk when played
backwards. These hidden messages are said to reflect the musings of the
subconscious mind. Bell, whose program was already a platform for nearly
every conceivable kind of paranormal claim, no matter how outrageous,
was now flirting with a pop-culture belief once confined to America's
fundamentalist loonies. Remember the hysteria over "back masking" on
rock 'n roll records, where heavy metal and rock groups were supposedly
seducing America's youngsters with concealed messages about sex and the
devil?
Neither "back masking" nor "reverse speech" analysis have
really withstood the test of inquiry. But reportedly, Hoagland and Bell
saw all of this as evidence of "remarkable cult religious references
among various members of the NASA team," a "rogue group" in the nation's
leading space and technology program. Levine says that for Hoagland, the
purpose of this cabal is to "fulfill Masonic traditions by carrying out
'Egyptian ritual philosophy' through space exploration."
Levine
adds that Hoagland is so convinced of the existence and perdition of
this Masonic group that he even suggests that the July 4 landing of the
Mars Pathfinder mission was faked, as were photos from the lander of a
"howitzer on Mars."
There's an ironic end to the tale of
Hoagland, Art Bell and "Kent Smith" -- at least for now. Hoagland says
that Kent Smith "admitted" that he was part of a disinformation
operation launched not by the Freemasons, but from the Defense
Intelligence Agency, with the purpose of discrediting the Art Bell show.
How's that for stream of consciousness plot writing?
There is
often an interaction between conspiracy theories and the claims of
pseudoscience advocates. After all, if Oswald wasn't just lucky, who's
to say that there is not a bevy of aliens coming-and-going from Area 51;
or that NASA begs for billions of taxpayer dollars to fund Martian
landers and reconnaissance of the Red Planet's surface so that the
evidence can be concealed? And why not play a conversation backwards so
that you can weave a series of words and phrases you THOUGHT you might
have heard into a conspiratorial tapestry involving some Freemasons
hiding out at Mission Control?
It is entertaining stuff, though,
just like "The X-Files." The problem is that we may be losing whatever
sense of skepticism and proportion our culture once had, as the area
between fact and fiction disintegrates and broadens into an enormous
epistemological netherworld where all claims are equally true, and
nothing is really false. If we are all provided with our 15 minutes of
media fame, logic suggests that all ideas enjoy their comparable period
of exposure, and often acceptance, under the bright lights of studios,
or the glowing screens which increasingly wire us to the internet.
So some, like Pat Robertson, gaze suspiciously at those Masonic
Lodges; others stare into photographs of a distant planet looking for
evidence of something they already believe in, for reasons know perhaps
only to themselves. I look at the gauzy picture of terrain at Cydonia.
Is it really evidence of a once great and wise alien culture? Or is
really an artifact we, not Martians, invented, a countenance laughing at
those who stare long enough, and believe?
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American
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