It is normally after the local Mason’s lodge has a successful fundraiser, that the clergy looks at his own unsuccessful charity event and wishes for the same thing. It is also we who compete with other charities endorced by TV preaching heads, and in so doing we compete with there paycheck. It’s only natural that these men and women, who have forgotten the real reason for charity and ministry, bash us out of envy.

You probably also believe that Saddam had WMD’s and that Afghanistan was harboring Osama?

One of those ‘Our government doesn’t lie to us, businesses are all honest, News casters can’t be bought’ people?

I’ll say one thing, for some people the comfort and mental peace attained by maintaining ignorance in a highly volatile and dangerous world is worth dieing for. It’s not easy to face the fact that you might have been brainwashed by media as you were growing up. It’s like being told you are adopted. It’s much easier to keep a shut-eye and pretend it’s all good. You’ve adopted the easy route.

Also, do you believe that the masonic symbols all being 100% directly related to pagan religions is just a coincidence? Or did the masons do that purposefully to create conspiracies for publicity? Wait, are you also an those extremist evolutionists who believes the entire universe and everything in it is a random coincidence? If so, that explains it lol. If everything is a coincidence, then what’s a few symbols here there.

- you keep your cool and resist the temptation to indulge in or respond to personal attacks, which will surely follow when you’ve seen off their flimsy arguments with gentle, but firm and repetitive requests for evidence or logic.

- you understand that you will not be allowed to be seen to win the debate: the audience for anti-masonry is like a cult that believes without wanting the inconvenience of facts. Believing silly conspiracy theories about the “360″ degrees of freemasonry makes them feel superior and you won’t be allowed to deprive them of that feeling. Know therefore, when to exist gracefully without necessarily having the last word.

The more we are seen to be shy and retiring, the more the anti-masonic conspiracists will be able to claim that we are secretive because we are up to no good.

I do wonder if the grand lodges are doing enough. Yes, they will conduct rebuttals in newspapers putting right articles that make untrue claims, but this policy completely misses the younger YouTube generation who have never bought a newspaper and are becoming convinced that freemasonry is a branch of a secret society run by alien lizards bent on bringing about a sinister “New World Order”. Barking mad, but people do seem to believe this stuff and I would urge the Grand lodges to be much more proactive in tackling it.

They have an advantage in that their audience is often conditioned to accepting wild claims (freemasonry is “satanic” etc.) without employing the least bit of critical thinking on their part. They have an audience used to believing things without evidence. If a preacher or other person in a place of authority says freemasonry is bad, it must, in their eyes, be so.

There’s that, plus the the very low quality threshhold many place on information found on the net. Controversial and scandalous claims are more appealing to the baser parts of our natures: the sites that offer such stuff necessarily jumps up Google’s rankings when someone searches for “freemasonry”.

I wrote something similar a couple of years ago, in which I categorized them as the religious, the konspiracists, and the kooks. And even back when I started blogging, I wrote about the ways that some of them seem to create a conspiracy out of whole cloth. The religious antis are arguably the worst because they have an unassailable logic (of a sort) which is essentially: God tells me that Masons are evil, and if you try to prove differently, then it’s just proof that Satan has entered your heart.” They can’t see the problem in the reasoning behind the (mistaken) idea that some Masons don’t even know that they are praying to a “false God.”

Of course, the idea that Baphomet is hijacking our spiritual WiFi just cracks me up.

More recently, I’ve been following an anti-Mason thread on a religious group, and I’ve been amazed at how many people can’t make the connection between the things that the “authorities” are railing against, and the fact that they sell books and DVDs about those subjects for only $39.95.