Askmen.com: 5 Things You Didn't Know About The Freemasons

The popular AskMen.com website has a concise, no-nonsense article today - 5 Things You Didn't Know About The Freemasons:

Freemasonry is the perfect example of how presumed secrecy “injures” those not privy to the secret: Exclusion is an insult, and those not in the know must learn the secret -- or else they get creative with the truth. Thus since their conventional establishment in 1717, Freemasons have been a whipping boy for paranoids...

(snip)

Freemasons do not send representatives to foreign countries hoping to save your soul, nor do they meter your body for “areas of concern.” They have no official publication or doctrinal book, no special oversight authority. From one to the next -- Swedish Rite, Scottish Rite, sponsored youth service organizations like Job’s Daughters International, DeMolay International FDC (of which Mickey Mouse is an honorary member), and on -- they have differing signs, symbols and rituals while following a shared set of very basic principles.

Freemasons might be the only subject of these AskMen.com features that aren’t searched enough, if only so that people would stop and learn something about them first. Then they can join the anti-Masonic nut-job legion and point their crooked finger at Freemasonry for its role in the Gunpowder Plot, Pearl Harbor, Watergate, 9-11, or whatever else you’ve got.

The world will always have miserable people in it. Miserable people need to blame others for their misery, and who better than a loose confederacy of do-gooders gathered around precepts like wisdom, strength and beauty? Francis Bacon said that it is the “solecism to power, to think to command the ends and yet not to endure the means.” So, if you want to know and you just have to know, join a lodge.

For some members of the public that’s asking way too much of them, they just want to be told.

So, thanks to that unearned sense of entitlement, we suspect the public’s interest in Freemasons will continue unabated until that fraternal conspiracy ends its bid for global domination. Since they will first have to start it, we may be here a while.

It's so unusual to read something in the press that is truthful about the fraternity, and even more unusual to see two in the same week (see Good Magazine). It's turning into a pretty good week after all.