A sad aspect of our civilization, not just in America but all over the world many extremely religious Christian communities have a list of must-hate groups pined up by their pastor to their hearts and minds. On that list are the Jews, the alleged killers of their made-up god Jesus, the Masons, those Satan worshipers that want to take over the world together with the Jews, the homosexuals, the ones their ignorant imaginary god hates so much because they are not like them, Islam, the bad religion, because Christianity is the good religion, the socialist, a homosexual who is a Mason and a Jew, and anyone else whose color of the skin is not as white as theirs.
They are not
inherently bad people but lack of education and effort to look for knowledge and
then process information is not an excuse for their retrograde mentality. They
were raised by their families, by their community, and by their pastors to
believe the church view on the world is the right one and to reject alternative
opinions. In order to protect their ability to control their congregations, and
the interest of their business partners, religious leaders resort to
discrediting groups of people they see as dangerous competition because they
have exposed the real agenda behind their belief system. They preach that their
imaginary god's world is made of “us-the-righteous” the "good
Christians" and that on the other side of it there are
them-Masons-Jews-Socialists and other Satanists, and that they can only find
protection from the enemy of their belief by submitting themselves body and
soul to the Christian church and its hierarchy.
The Enlightenment,
the 1789 French Revolution, and the 1848 European Revolution were Masonic
movements intended to free man from the trap of belief and social injustice.
There is a centuries-old subterranean conflict between Freemasons and the
church. On one hand, religious institutions want to maintain their control over
the population of the planet by keeping man ignorant of his true spiritual
nature and destiny, of its "immortality," as symbolically put in a
recently released movie called Cloud Atlas. On the other, the Masons seem to
want to change that perception by the way of knowledge, genuine science, and by
creating the premises for a new world order where freedom, equality and a
brotherhood of all allows man complete access to his otherwise inalienable
rights and magnificent potential.
Indeed, America was
founded on the same principles that motivated those behind the great social and
cultural eighteen and nineteen century movements in Europe. This is the reason
why the French Freemasons, the ones who later on would donate the Statue of
Liberty to the American people were such dedicated supporters of the American
Revolution. While defending the natural right of everyone to believe whatever
his level of cognitive development entices him or her to believe, one of the
most prominent among those principles was that man should not have to live his
life based on what he believes but on what he knows. Because of that, the
Masons and the Rosicrucians were staunch supporters of a total separation of
church and state.
Excerpts from “A Time to Change – On the Necessary Return to a Rational Understanding of the Nature of Man and the Universe.”
Chapter 2.
In 1789, General Marie
Joseph Paul, Marquis de Lafayette, the commander of the Paris National Guard,
declared that “If the liberties of the American people are ever destroyed, they
will fall by the hands of the clergy.” By then he had helped George Washington
and his ragtag band of rebels win the American Revolutionary War.
On December 7, 1776,
Lafayette signed up in Paris as a volunteer with the American Revolutionary
Army and at the age of twenty, the Congress awarded him the rank of major
general. Almost two hundred and thirty years later, in July of 2002, the
Congress made him an honorary citizen of the United States, a distinction
granted only to five other personalities: Winston Churchill, great statesman
and former British Prime Minister, Mother Teresa, the Albanian-Indian Nobel
Peace Prize recipient known for her acts of kindness and compassion toward the
less favored ones, Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish humanitarian who saved more than
15,000 Jews from the Holocaust and died at the hands of Stalin’s secret state
police, William Penn, and his wife Hanna, the founder of the state of
Pennsylvania. There is one significant common denomination for this particular
group of people: Churchill, Wallenberg, Lafayette, and Penn were all
Freemasons, while Mother Teresa has often expressed views that mirrored with
exceptional clarity the Masonic ideals.
Lafayette’s opinion that the clergy and the
church was prone to deprive people of their natural rights and in America’s
particular instance of the freedoms recently established by the Congress was
shared by many among the founding fathers. The history of the European
countries they came from gave them good reasons to take that threat seriously,
and as James Madison would acknowledge a few years later, “Strongly guarded as
is the separation between Religion & Government in the Constitution of the
United States the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies, may be
illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history.” (James
Madison, Detached Memoranda, 1820) Encroachment by ecclesiastic bodies into the
governing of America, however, is something still occurring today as certain
religious organizations are constantly inserting into the political discourse
such wedge issues as abortion, contraceptives, and gay marriage rights.
To be able to argue
against or in support of a certain issue one has to be knowledgeable of all its major composing aspects. Jefferson was a good student of the Christian religion and
he knew, for example, that the texts of the Bible had been manipulated by the
church in order to distort the true history of man and Christianity, as well as
Jesus’ real message. Based on that knowledge he reached a conclusion that may
shock today’s believers who watch religiously their FOX News opinion shows, Pat
Robertson, Joel Osteen and other “successful” evangelists’ TV programs. In a
letter to John Adams dated August 15, 1820, Jefferson describes the doctrine of
the church as “masked atheism.” Many Christian apologetics are claiming this
quote was taken out of context, and that Jefferson was not as critical of
Christianity as some say he was. Let us read the entire passage from the
letter, though, and see if they have a point or if that is just another
defensive propagandistic false proclamation:
To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, God, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But a heresy it certainly is. Jesus told us indeed that ‘God is a spirit,’ but he has not defined what a spirit is, nor said that it is not matter. And the ancient fathers generally, if not universally, held it to be matter: light and thin indeed, an etherial gas; but still matter. (Letter to John Adams, August 15, 1820)
Without a doubt,
Jefferson is using the syntagm “masked atheism” in reference to the doctrine of
the church, and as we will see all throughout the book, he was correct about
that. More importantly, Jefferson points out to something today’s Christian
believers are not aware of precisely because from an early age they have been
indoctrinated with the irrational doctrine of the church. Jesus and the church
are at odds all the time, and that too will be revealed extensively here. In
this particular instance, according to Jefferson, Jesus and the church are at
odds with their understanding of the concept of god. In the letter to Adams, he
reminds his rediscovered friend that Jesus explained god as being material but
“a spirit.” In other words, for Jesus and Jefferson, but not according to the
church or our positivist materialist scientists, the spiritual is a form of
energy, something similar to light, he says, and this was way before Einstein
and Max Planck would state that matter was an illusion and that both particles
and waves were actually energies vibrating at different frequencies.
On March 3rd, 2006,
NBC’s Lester Holt interviewed a certain Reverend David McAlpin. Advocating for
Christianity to become a state religion, McAlpin’s primary argument in favor of
what would be a first step toward the establishing of an American theocracy was
the fact that, according to him, the founding fathers “believed in a Christian
God.” While nothing could be farther from the truth,
the question is, was he sincerely unaware that the major players in the
American Revolution were Masons and Rosicrucians affiliated with a movement
called Enlightenment during a time also known as the Age of Reason who never
embraced Christianity as their religion? Did he not read the
Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights, two major documents
associated with the birth of this United States that not once mention McAlpin’s
“Christian God”? Was he a very confused human whose mind was trapped in crass
ignorance of the true history of America and religious beliefs? Was he perhaps
intentionally misleading the American public, or both?
Benjamin Franklin and
George Washington were the most prominent Masons among the leaders of the
American Revolution. According to AMORC (Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis)
and many other sources, Thomas Jefferson, who was not a Mason, Benjamin
Franklin, and Thomas Paine, a Freemason, were “intimately connected to the
Rosicrucian community” in Philadelphia. This community was established in 1694
based on a plan originally proposed by Francis Bacon, the famous British
philosopher, scientist, and statesman. As acknowledged in our history books,
major players in the American Revolution, Paul Revere and John Hancock too were
Freemasons. John Adams was not a Mason but same as Thomas Jefferson he would
openly express his disdain of religious belief and of religion interfering with
governing, of Christianity in particular and of its clerics’ villainous
politicking. While not always in agreement, Adams and Jefferson often shared Franklin
and Washington’s views on issues of most importance for the future of the
country. Not Masons by direct affiliation, they were certainly Masons in
spirit. Out of the five dominant personalities behind the putting together of
the Constitution, three of them were Masons: Franklin, Washington and Edmund
Randolph. The other two were, again, Jefferson and Adams who happened to have a
low opinion of Christianity.
We were sitting in
front of our TV sets waiting for the network to produce the necessary rebuttal
of McAlpin’s statement. No one in the control room seemed to be able or willing
to whisper the correct response in Holt’s earpiece, though, and the reporter
left us with the impression that he was not prepared to defend the truth about
the history of his country.
Many of the leading
founding fathers were consistently exposing the Christian god of the Old
Testament, one of the many gods of the Bible, for being a cruel and irrational
character. They also dismissed as false the claim made by the church that Jesus
was god. The founders viewed him as a teacher who was made into a pagan god by
unscrupulous religious leaders who distorted and actually totally abandoned his
teachings. They were convinced, however, that behind the making of the universe
and man there was some kind of magnificent force or energy, they called it
“Supreme Being.” Because of that the first paragraph of The Declaration of
Independence was intended to remind the world that the revolutionaries were venerating a “Nature’s God,” not the Christian one, a view on the concept of god that happens to be
similar to the position adopted by the Mayans.
Revisiting the ideas and the ideals the nation was founded upon in order to
make clear his opinion that religion had no place in governing, in 1788, John
Adams declared that, “The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the
first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature . . .”
That comes in starch contrast with the opinion that America was established on
Christian belief in imaginary gods, imaginary saints, and in an imaginary
supernatural creation, as claimed today in churches and on FOX News.
Other than that, in
Article 11 of the “Treaty of peace and friendship between the United States of
America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli, of Barbary,” better known as the
Treaty of Tripoli, George Washington stated unequivocally that, “the government
of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
Many later representatives of the people, however, including recent Presidents
of the United States, seem to have completely forgotten that. The Senate
approved the treaty on June 7, 1797, and then three days later President John
Adams officially ratified it.
The colonists founded
America and started building a new social world order not on irrational religious
beliefs but, as stated in the same Declaration of Independence, on “the Laws of
Nature,” on a Masonic vision about the establishment of a true brotherhood of
man on planet Earth, a brotherhood founded on the principles of fraternity,
equality, and liberty for all. As Freemason James Madison states in one of his
letters, “We are teaching the world the great truth that Governments do better
without Kings & Nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the
other lesson that Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the
aid of Government.” (James Madison, Letter to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822)
In other words, the founders had no intention to allow religion in general or
Christianity in particular to be part of a government elected by all the people
that was supposed to serve all the people, no matter their personal belief.
On the first day of
January in 2007, Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the house and prominent
member of the Republican Party appeared in a special FOX News program to
advocate for what else other than the commingling of religion and politics.
That, however, comes in conflict with the provisions made in the Constitution,
with the ideals promoted by Madison and many others before, during, and after
his time. Having a rich history of making statements disassociated from fact or
reason along his entire career, including during his new and unsuccessful 2012 bid for
US presidency, Gingrich came very close to declaring that the
Washington Monument in Washington, DC was a Christian symbol. In reality, the Monument is only one among the
many other Masonic landmarks that give the capital of the country its uniquely
solemn aspect. Most importantly, this one too was meant to be a reminder of the
fact that the principles America was founded on have roots in the wisdom shared
with us by sources outside our civilization and stored in Egypt.
Indeed, as anyone interested
could find out today by doing a quick search on the Internet, the capital of
America is laced with Masonic, not Christian symbolism. The entire design of
the original central part of the city is based on esoteric knowledge. Without a doubt, the City of Washington was envisioned and built
by Masons, and there is nothing suggesting Christian belief about how it was done either.
In 1791, George
Washington, a known Mason, appointed a French born American architect by the
name of Pierre (Peter) Charles L’Enfant to design a plan for the new capital of
the recently established United States of America. According to the records
kept at the William R. Singleton Hope Lebanon Lodge #7, L’Enfant too was a
Mason. He came to America when French revolutionary Pierre Augustine Caron de
Beaumarchais, also a Mason, recruited him to join the American Revolution.
Lafayette, another Mason, later commissioned him to paint the portrait of
George Washington. Because of disagreements between L’Enfant on one side,
Washington, Jefferson, and the Commissioners on the other, L’Enfant lost
eventually his appointment. They replaced him with Andrew Ellicott, a Mason,
who continued the surveying of the new city. Ellicott revised L’Enfant’s
original plan and used Freemasons to survey the boundaries of what was to
become the District of Columbia.
At the insistence of
French Ambassador Jean Jules Jusserand, at the beginning of the 20th century a
special commission was established in order to reinstate the original L’Enfant
plan. Jusserand too was a Mason. He was appointed French Ambassador to America
in 1905, by President Émile Loubet, the one who signed two very important
documents at the time for France: a treaty with Edward VII of England, a known
Mason, and a law that established the separation of church and state, a
decision that infuriated the Church in Rome since it was causing her to lose
control over the French government. Loubet was the French President who
pardoned Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French-Jewish officer falsely accused of
treason.
The new plan for the
city included the concept for the current National Mall. In the end, a
commission appointed by the American government adopted the design of the
capital we have today, a design based on the original L’Enfant plan. In history
books, this commission is known as The McMillan Commission, and it was named
after Republican senator James McMillan, who was in charge of the project.
McMillan was born in 1838, in a family of Scottish ancestry from the town of
Hamilton, Canada. A Grand Lodge of Canada was established in Hamilton in 1855.
In his Maybole, Carrick’s Capital Facts, Fiction and Folks (Alloway Publishing,
Ayr, 1972), James T. Gray mentions an 1859 record showing John and James
McMillan as members of the Scottish Lodge Royal Arch No. 198. If they were or
not related to the McMillan’s who immigrated earlier to Canada is something to
be determined. James McMillan’s name, however, the head of the McMillan
Commission, appears listed in William R. Deslow’s 10,000 Famous Freemasons
(Cornerstone Book Publishers, 2007).
The McMillan Commission
rounded up eventually some of the greatest architects of the time. They were to
build the new city of Washington, and they were to do that following the
direction proposed earlier by the Freemason L’Enfant. The most prominent among
them were:
- Daniel Burnham, a
Mason who designed the Masonic Temple Building in Chicago;
- Frederick Law
Olmsted, Jr., who, among others, is credited with designing the walkways for
the St. James Park in San Jose, California, a design incorporating Masonic
geometry and symbolism. St. James was one of Jesus’ disciples. Masons venerate
him while San Jose is the city where AMORC, the Rosicrucian Order, has its
headquarters;
- Charles Follen McKim,
the architect that designed the J. Piermont Morgan Library. Morgan too was a
Mason;
- Augustus
Saint-Gaudens. One of his first commissions for a major work of art was a
statue titled Silence. He finished this project in 1874. In 1876, it was
displayed inside the New York City Lodge. Currently the statue is at the
Masonic Hospital in Utica. (Academia Lodge No. 847, Silence in Freemasonry, By
Shown Eyer).
In June of 1792, George
Washington summoned from Charleston, South Carolina, an Irish architect by the
name of James Hoban. He was given the task of designing the new Executive
Mansion, the future White House. Hoban was a devout Catholic but according to
Masonic rules, anyone can become a Freemason as long as he would not
proselytize for his religion within the brotherhood. Indeed, James Hoban was
the Worshipful Master of the Federal Lodge #15.
There is no confusion
about the fact that the obelisk on the Mall was modeled after a famous Egyptian
monument, the symbol for the power of the Sun God Ra. The obelisk in itself is
a phallic symbol associated with the cult of Osiris. At the time the Washington
Monument was being built (between 1848 and 1884), it was customary to use
obelisks as funerary monuments and cemeteries abounded in this type of
tombstone. However, the real purpose of the obelisk remains a controversial topic of debate among historians. Ironically, the only way one could subscribe to Newt Gingrich’s
veiled suggestion that the Washington Monument was a Christian symbol is if he
also accepts the fact that Christianity is an offshoot of the Egyptian Sun Cult
and of the Osiris myth.
Exposed repeatedly for
falsifying history, Newt Gingrich’s Christian right made a habit out of
crediting the American President John Quincy Adams, the son of John Adams, with
saying that “The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: It
connected in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with
those of Christianity.” That is one declaration Quincy Adams never made and it
represents a work of fiction by David Barton, a Christian propagandist and
pseudo-historian from Texas known for fabricating records in order to prove the
United States of America was founded on Christian principles. Barton inserted
the quote in a 1996 video called America’s Godly Heritage, a dishonest
propaganda tool that was to be used by the Christian right to teach American
children a falsified history. The video was characterized by the U.S. judge who
ruled against the use of it in schools as nothing more than “a ruse to teach
fundamentalist Christianity.” That does not mean they did not go ahead and
played the video in churches anyway. They use it to brainwash the future
America, children attending Sunday Bible class, and they use it during TV
programs ran by religious organizations.
Despite that harsh condemnation of the video by the judge, Pat Robertson, the American televangelist and businessman who put the bases for an extremely political Christian Coalition, and also for a few personal shoddy business enterprises, found the video to be very, very instructive. Reverend Jerry Falwell, founder of the Christian Liberty University used to sell Barton’s books on his extremely lucrative Christian website, while James Dobson, a prominent evangelical Christian propagandist and radio host, gave him a public voice by repeatedly interviewing Barton on his program.
Bill O’Reilly, the FOX News commentator who occasionally reminds everyone he is a historian, trusted the information taken from David Barton’s books and videos was authentic without checking the source, though, something good historians usually do. During a National Public Radio interview with Terry Gross, O’Reilly adamantly declared that, “We are founded on a Judeo-Christian philosophy. There’s no question about that. And I have a degree in history, I have all of Jefferson’s and Madison’s letters and I know what I am talking about.” Anyone who does a search in Google for the words ‘James Madison letters’ will be able to read a collection made of 312 pieces of correspondence, some of which were quoted here. Not known for intellectual integrity or an accurate interpretation of facts, in a book called Who’s Looking Out for You?, “historian” O’Reilly uses one of the Madison quotes made up by Barton. That, however, was not the only time he was caught disseminating erroneous information from the pulpit offered by the ultra-conservative, pro-Republican, and pro-Christian cable station he works for. O’Reilly may hold a degree in history but he appears to be an expert in making up histories.
Despite that harsh condemnation of the video by the judge, Pat Robertson, the American televangelist and businessman who put the bases for an extremely political Christian Coalition, and also for a few personal shoddy business enterprises, found the video to be very, very instructive. Reverend Jerry Falwell, founder of the Christian Liberty University used to sell Barton’s books on his extremely lucrative Christian website, while James Dobson, a prominent evangelical Christian propagandist and radio host, gave him a public voice by repeatedly interviewing Barton on his program.
Bill O’Reilly, the FOX News commentator who occasionally reminds everyone he is a historian, trusted the information taken from David Barton’s books and videos was authentic without checking the source, though, something good historians usually do. During a National Public Radio interview with Terry Gross, O’Reilly adamantly declared that, “We are founded on a Judeo-Christian philosophy. There’s no question about that. And I have a degree in history, I have all of Jefferson’s and Madison’s letters and I know what I am talking about.” Anyone who does a search in Google for the words ‘James Madison letters’ will be able to read a collection made of 312 pieces of correspondence, some of which were quoted here. Not known for intellectual integrity or an accurate interpretation of facts, in a book called Who’s Looking Out for You?, “historian” O’Reilly uses one of the Madison quotes made up by Barton. That, however, was not the only time he was caught disseminating erroneous information from the pulpit offered by the ultra-conservative, pro-Republican, and pro-Christian cable station he works for. O’Reilly may hold a degree in history but he appears to be an expert in making up histories.
As seen, the actual
position adopted by Jefferson and Madison on the issue of the church
interfering in the activity of the government and on Christianity in general
was everything but what Barton and O’Reilly claimed it was. In the genuine
letters the FOX commentator has repeatedly misrepresented, Jefferson and
Madison are in fact expressing their full support for an absolute separation of
church and state.
Aside from being a
Mason and the driving force behind the writing of the Constitution, James
Madison was also extremely critical of the Christianity preached in churches
and deplored its venomous intolerance of those exposing the irrational of its
doctrine and its immorality. In the 1785 Memorial and Remonstrance against
Religious Assessments, he makes his low opinion of the Christian religion known
again, and he does that in no ambiguous terms: “During almost fifteen centuries
has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its
fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy,
ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and
persecution.” This is not exactly Madison singing the praises for Christianity
or seeking moral guidance in its dogma, as O’Reilly and Barton claimed he did.
In the end, Barton was forced to
publicly acknowledge that the quotes attributed by him to the founding fathers
in order to establish an otherwise nonexistent connection between the American Revolution
and his imaginary “Judeo-Christian philosophy” were outright fabrications.
Logic and common sense invites to an inevitable conclusion: one of the most prominent characteristics of the American right wing conservatism is its identifying with the goals of the religious establishment. It was by the decision of a majority of the members of an able American government founded on strong, rational principles that religious organizations would be kept out of governing. As a result, churches have a more or less well-disguised disdain for an efficient government that acts based on reason instead of religious fervor. It is not exactly a surprised to see a political organization associated with the religious right, like the Republican Party, and a news organization like FOX News that profits from offering its platform as an extension of the Republican Party and a propaganda display board for the religious right, all three of them constantly advocating for a smaller and consequently less potent government. These organizations happen to be financed by corporate America, a corporate America that wants a weak government so it could do whatever it pleases it to do without any concern for Mother Nature or the well-being of a man whose hard work and difficult life is what corporate America was actually built on.
Logic and common sense invites to an inevitable conclusion: one of the most prominent characteristics of the American right wing conservatism is its identifying with the goals of the religious establishment. It was by the decision of a majority of the members of an able American government founded on strong, rational principles that religious organizations would be kept out of governing. As a result, churches have a more or less well-disguised disdain for an efficient government that acts based on reason instead of religious fervor. It is not exactly a surprised to see a political organization associated with the religious right, like the Republican Party, and a news organization like FOX News that profits from offering its platform as an extension of the Republican Party and a propaganda display board for the religious right, all three of them constantly advocating for a smaller and consequently less potent government. These organizations happen to be financed by corporate America, a corporate America that wants a weak government so it could do whatever it pleases it to do without any concern for Mother Nature or the well-being of a man whose hard work and difficult life is what corporate America was actually built on.
(Last revised on 03.22.2013)
THE
PLEIADES
“Your
destiny is in the stars! Don’t you doubt that for a minute.” - Robert Dean
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