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The Masonic Conspiracy
by E. Scott Ryan, MM

Before I became a Mason, I had heard
rumors about a Masonic Conspiracy, so
I decided to become a Freemason in
order to find out for myself if there were
any truth to it. Knowing that a little
knowledge is a dangerous thing, I played
it safe by going through all the rites and
degrees of Masonry. In other words, I
learned all that I could in leaving no
secret unexamined.

Although some of the secrets and mys-
teries of the Craft are conceived to be
religious, Freemasonry is neither secret
nor a religion; and while I do not intend
to reveal everything, I will reveal the
sublime secret that says everything
about Masonry that is, indeed, a con-
spiracy.

I was the first member of my Roman
Catholic family to become a Mason, the
reason being that I was cautioned as a
child that some Masons were secretive,
anti-Catholic Protestants . Later as an
adult, I learned that some Catholics were
openly anti-Masonic and that Catholics
had been prohibited from becoming Ma-
sons by pre-Vatican II Catholicism
rather than Masonry.

What I relish most as a Freemason,
today, is looking back at such an un-
fortunate lack of freedom in my own and
others' religious divisions, while looking
forward with my Protestant and Catholic
Masonic brothers to a day when "Prot-
estant" and "Catholic" mean less to
each than God means to both. For good
reasons, religion and politics are not dis-
cussed at lodge meetings, lest the divi-
sions of the past and present interfere
with God's plans for unity in the future.

I would hope that other religious divi-
sions such as the present-day Southern
Baptist faction devoted more to preach-
ing against Masonry than preaching for
God, would become free enough to allow
their members the freedom to make their
own individual choices about Freema-
sonry. After all, from theJudaic concept
of a chosen people, to the Christian
choice for God in Jesus, and to the Is-
lamic choice of the Prophet, choice is
what God asks of everyone.

In exercising their freedom of choice,
Freemasons not only freely choose God,
but they have acted upon their faith by
donating two million dollars a day to
charity in the United States alone. While
Martin Luther taught the truth of salva-
tion by faith alone and condemned a
faith in good works alone, a faith without
good works condemns itself; and while
one cannot work one's way to God's gift
of faith, one must work out one's faith
with God's gifts. Both Jesus Christ and
Martin Luther would approve of what
Masons do in responding to human need
in the name of their faith in the Father-
hood of God and the Brotherhood of
Man.

Masonry may not be for everyone--
certainly not for the ethno- and religio-
centric. No one is asked to join. In fact,
in order to join, one must ask rather than
be asked. Further, Masons ask no ques-
tions as to a family's religious affiliation
or resources in meeting every medical
need of a child crippled by burns, bone
disease, or multiple sclerosis, or other
illnesses .

So why then do some, religious and
secular alike, attack us, as Masons, for
conspiring against them when we con-
spire against no one?

Masons have a long history of being on
the receiving end of hate, although we
advocate tolerance and brotherhood
under God. We have chosen the mono-
theism of Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam as the religious foundation of our
spiritual fraternity. Unlike religion, we
exclude no Muslim, Christian, orJew as
less chosen before God. We respect the
Jewish Temple of Solomon, the Chris-
tian Cross of Jesus, and the Islamic sur-
render to Allah's will--in denying no
one, in affirming the one in all and the
all in one of one universal God.

Historically, the case can be made that
second only to the Jews, Masons have
been the continuing subject of conspira-
tional calumny from both religious and
secular sources. Ironically, those who
have been most vociferous have dis-
played the same attributes that they have
attributed to Masonry: a conspiracy to
control others through religion and ide-
ology. Whether it be the Hitlerites of the
past or chauvinistic nationalists of the
present, they love to hate the Masons
who hate no one.

For example, Pamyat (meaning mem-
ory), the extreme nationalist group in
Russia, regularly associates Masonry
and Zionism as co-conspirators, with se-
cret Masonic rituals of the nature of Zi-
onist protocols. This memory is tragi-
cally hateful when it proceeds from those
who have fought both failed communism
and the failures of capitalism in failing to
understand that Masonry is an enemy to
no one except to those who love to hate.

In response to those who abuse free
speech in attacking us or any other vic-
tims of hateful expression, the correct
defense is not the politically-expensive
offense of a further abuse of free speech
by politically correct censorship or hate
laws. It is, rather, more correctness in
truth and less in politics--by more un-
censored truth (be it politically correct or
incorrect) and less censored freedom of
speech and expression. Whether it be
anti-Masonic, antiSemitic, anti- black,
anti-white, anti-Catholic, or anti-what-
ever group, more free speech rather than
less freedom of speech is called for.

Accordingly, as a new Mason who re-
cently became a 32 member of the
Scottish Rite and a Knight Templar in
the York Rite along with the Shrine and
Grotto, I decided on my own to reveal
the real conspiracy of Masonry, the sub-
lime secret by telling the greatest truth of
Freemasonry, that of the Divine.

The primary requirement of becoming
a speculative Free and Accepted
Mason--in contrast to the earlier opera-
tive Masons who built cathedrals with
physical materials--is personal belief in
one God, the Grand Architect of the
Universe, as Masons describe the Al-
mighty. The second belief and duty cor-
ollary to the first, is that of spiritually
building the Brotherhood of Man under
the Fatherhood of God. To those with a
monotheistic background--be it Jewish,
Christian, or Muslim--our belief may
sound pleasantly familiar. To others--
atheists and secular humanists--it may
sound too familiar in the well-founded
suspicion that such descriptions about
religious truth obscure what has been
less than wonderful in religious practice.

This suspicion of the very idea of God
in any man's religion is one that Ma-
sonry understands without rejecting the
reality of God that some men rejected in
their practice of religion, even more than
in the secular denial of it.

In reference to our belief in spiritual
brotherhood, we know that the great
monotheistic religions of Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam--as great as they
are in their beliefs, have often been less
than great in the practice of that belief.
All three have at one time or another
persecuted not only each other, but
themselves in intra-religious holy wars
even more unholy in their ungodliness
than the inhumanity of inter-religious
crusades, pogroms, inquisitions, jihads,
and "God gave your land to me" reli-
gious and ethnic cleansings.

We understand why many have turned
away from God in the belief that more of
God has brought less to man; therefore,
less of God should bring more to Man.
We understand this secular belief in reli-
gious non-belief without agreeing with
it, for there exists a fatal flaw in the
secular humanistic critique of God and
Man. This flaw lies neither in humanism
nor in God, but in man's proclivity of
secular belief in man as God, when he
rejects the religious belief in a God for all
men.

The Enlightenment philosophy in the
West was quite different from Buddhist
enlightenment in the East. In freeing
Western man from a transcendent God,
it left him with a transcendent belief
without a belief in the Transcendent, a
transcendence without the Transcen-
dent, in a belief in any belief--culminat-
ing in laissez faire (lousy faire) capital-
ism, international socialism (Commu-
nism), national socialism (Nazism), and
more recently, national communism (in
the newly free escape from freedom in
many former communist lands).

Nazism, in particular, was a logical de-
velopment rather than an aberration in
the land of Goethe, of a secular humanist
enlightenment that defined what was
good for oneself and one' s group without
reference to any universal God as the
basis of brotherhood. That humanism--
in all its human perfection--could be-
come perfectly inhumane was a paradox,
but not a contradiction. Such a develop-
ment is quite logical when man tran-
scends himself without the Transcen-
dent. The fact that the religious history
of man acting in the name of his one God
was often quite ungodly, only became
even more godless when man secularly
transcended himself by putting himself
in God's place.

Both the religious ungodliness and sec-
ular godlessness of man proceeded nei-
ther from God nor from man alone, but
from disassociation of the correct rela-
tion of God and man.

Therefore, a correct belief in God is
more than a matter of personal faith in
the intellectual assent of one's will to
one's religion. The correct association
between God and men involves the col-
lective will to perfect one's religious faith
in being perfected in one God for all men,
rather than being perfect in one's faith
for oneself or one's group.

The disassociation of God and Man in
either believing in one God for oneself
instead of for all men as brothers, or in
denying God by acting like a god, with
the secular dogmas of human predestina-
tion according to evolution, class, eco-
nomics or ethnicity, explains the greatest
human irony of all: good and evil become
one and the same with the greatest good
justifying the greatest evil. Whether it be
religious or secular totalitarianism, what
is totally good becomes totally bad, with
the best virtue justifying the worst vice.
The ultimate vice of this religious or sec-
ular virtue proceeds from the incorrect
association of oneness with God by de-
fining one's own God or good in terms of
what is good for oneself in one's group.

The Hitlerian refrain of "Ein Volk, Ein
Reich, Ein Fuehrer" (one people, one
realm, one leader) is the ultimate secular
version of ethnic cleansing that pro-
ceeded from the secular version of
chosenness: a religious cleansing
wherein the religious concept of a Cho-
sen People became that of a "Chosin" ~
People--a people of Sin--when a new
Chosen People, the Master Race, appro-
priated chosenness to themselves in elim-
inating Jews and others as "chosin. "

Whether man denies himself in the
name of God or denies God in the name
of man, men have disassociated them-
selves from God in the death of Man
rather than death of God. Mankind's
unkind history of religiously and secu-
larly appropriating oneness with the one
true God to himself, alone, or to his
group, to the exclusion of others, has
been a persistent human lie in opposition
to the everlasting truth of a universal,
inclusive God.

The Masonic conspiracy is to conspire
for God in a fraternal brotherhood of
those who believe in one god for every-
one over one's God for oneself or one's
group. We respect religion as God meant
it to be rather than as man has made it to
be. The sublime secret of Freemasonry is
that God is no secret, although God has
been kept secret by those who do evil in
the name of good by putting their belief
in their God, or in their secular substitute
for God for themselves, in the place of
one God for everyone.

The Masonic conspiracy is a quirk of
faith in being unique in being universal,
in being existentially free, in being essen-
tially bound in the spiritual foundation
of the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic
faith in God. The conspiracy is to be the
same and to be different in having the
same faith as others in their religious
faith in God without rejecting others ac-
cording to religion. The conspiratorial
mystery of our Craft is in this religious
quirk of faith that goes beyond religion
without rejecting religion, in attempting
to build what has yet to be built and
house what has yet to be housed in the
spiritual architecture of a religious Fa-
therhood of God in addition to the Fa-
therhood in religion, and in building a
Brotherhood in one God to supplement
any one brotherhood in religion.

When you see the Letter G displayed
on Masonic artifacts, it displays the fact
that Masonry is God's architecture of
choice, such that all men are chosen as
brothers under the Fatherhood of God,
such that no person or people are
"chosin" (in being sinfully regarded as
less), when all people are chosen in
choosing God. Were there to be less of a
place for Masonry, the "never again"
refrain to man's inhumanity to man will
be religiously deaf and secularly dumb in
an "ever again" echo of man's religious
and secular disassociations of God and
Man in the misappropriation of God and
disappropriation of men.

Whether you be Protestant or Catholic
Jew or Muslim, if you believe in one
God, in the Fatherhood of God and the
Brotherhood of Man, then consider be-
coming a Mason--better yet, a Master
Mason defined by the mastery of self for
others, rather than over them. There are
mysteries of the Craft in crafting the
mystery of God and Man; and there are
secrets, just as an army has battle secrets
with which to achieve victory. However,
our battle is for a peaceful victory, for the
peace of God that surpasses human un-
derstanding, that, in its passing, can be
understood by every human being.

The Freemasonic conspiracy is to bring
men together as God intended in a free
choice beyond one's God to one God for
all men in the spiritual fraternity of every
man's being chosen in God such that
what still remains as the "ever again" of
human destructiveness can some day be
stilled and "never again," that day
being the day when no man or group is
" chosin" (in the sinful choice of perceiv-
ing others as less chosen than them-
selves, when God is chosen by and for all
men.

* My term to express self-serving
chosin-ness as distinct from universal
spiritual chosenness.


The Philalethes, October 1993
