Re: Freemasonry is not evil
But I will not stand idly by while a group of people is demonised with no solid evidence present. It wouldn't matter if it was the Freemasons or the Star Trek fanclub. It smelt like the Spanish Inquisition in here. You might as well have renamed the thread 'Malleus Maleficarum'.
"No solid evidence"? After a little bit of evidence on the numerological symbolism that they use in order to point out to each other who was behind the killings?
As Das Moose poignantly put it, you will not allow "nice" masons to be "demonised" while you have sarcastically dismissed what others see as their "perceived enemy".
Perhaps there is "no evidence" that will satisfy your "compassionate intellect" because many of those who try to bring out evidence end up murdered.
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"I saw a code of Masonic legislation adapted to prostrate every principle of equal justice and to corrupt every sentiment of virtuous feeling in the soul of him who bound his allegiance to it.... I saw the practice of common honesty, the kindness of Christian benevolence, even the abstinence of atrocious crimes; limited exclusively by lawless oaths and barbarous penalties, to the social relations between the Brotherhood and the Craft. I saw slander organize into a secret, widespread and affiliated agency....I saw self-invoked imprecations of throats cut from ear to ear, of hearts and vitals torn out and cast off and hung on spires. I saw wine drunk from a human skull with solemn invocation of all the sins of its owner upon the head of him who drank it."
- President John Quincy Adams
"My main object was to show, so far as my humble ability was capable of showing, to the people of this country what I believed was the truth, that there was a tendency, if not a conspiracy, among those who have engineered this slavery question for the last four or five years, to make slavery perpetual and universal in this nation..."
- President Abraham Lincoln (murdered)
"All secret, oath bound, political parties are dangerous to any nation."
- President Ulysses S. Grant
"The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it."
- President Kennedy (murdered)
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Granger testified:
[center]"They [President Johnson and Albert Pike] talked a great deal about Masonry. More about that than anything else.. And from what they talked about between them, I gathered that he [Pike] was the superior of the President in Masonry. I understood from the meeting that the president was his subordinate in Masonry...."[/center]
In April, 1866, Johnson invited Albert Pike to the White House, whereupon he was conferred the title of 32nd degree Scottish Rite freemason. Just a few months prior to that, Pike was hiding in Canada, hunted by the U.S. Army for complicity in the Lincoln assassination. Johnson, however, soon pardoned him upon assuming office.