Why I Doubt I’ll Ever be a Freemason

[Tobin S.]

This is a little essay I wrote for a different site. The owner of that site has been AWOL since last August. I had been busy writing stories for him before I realized he was on a seemingly permanent vacation. So I've got a few of them on my hard drive that weren't published. I figured this one would be appropriate for this group.

My father-in-law is a 33rd degree Freemason. That is the highest level in the fraternity that you can attain and it represents years of involvement within the organization. The local lodges sometimes serve breakfast to the public for a small fee. I’ve gone to a few of them with my father-in-law. I went to one today, and one of the brothers of the fraternity asked when I was going to join. It used to be that Masons weren’t allowed to approach people about membership, and up until the 1920s, the Masons were a highly secretive organization. It was up to the initiate to approach a Mason about membership until recently. Even a father could not encourage his own son to join. Things have changed, though. The policies of secrecy caused the society’s membership to collectively age and start to fade away as fewer and fewer younger men felt compelled to join. It seems that, in an effort to save the organization, Masons are now more open to sharing the ideas of their society and will openly ask other men if they’d like to join.

When I was at one of these breakfasts at my father-in-law’s lodge, I noticed that they had set up a table with a lot of literature about the Masons on it. I picked up one pamphlet and took a look at it. It was about how to join the Masons. It’s a fraternity, so they only accept men, and you also have to profess a belief in a higher power. You don’t have to be an adherent to a particular faith, you just have to believe in a god, basically. I am an agnostic and I have told that to my father-in-law. I could not be a member of the organization unless I was intellectually dishonest. I have no faith in any religion or god.

My wife has told me that her father has long desired a son-in-law who would join the Masons. She is an only child. Her folks have no son to continue the tradition of Freemasonry in the family. I saw his desire a little bit in him today. When a fellow Mason asked him if I was going to join he just said that I wasn’t ready yet. The implication being that I will be someday. I seriously doubt it unless they allow me to claim the universe as my higher power. Otherwise, I cannot join in good faith.

My agnosticism is not likely something that will change in me, at least not in the direction of belief. Once I lost faith in religion, and that happened to me when I was just a teenager, I saw that there would likely be no going back to the old way. I am all about intellectual freedom. After losing my faith, religion appeared to me to be a prison for the mind. It seemed to be rooted in fear: fear of death, fear of losing one’s moral compass, fear of people who are different, fear of getting lost in substance abuse, fear of different ideas and intellectuals.

My wife’s family are Episcopalians. They are much more open to a diversity of people and ideas than most denominations. I call it the rock and roll version of Christianity. I’ve been to the church on several occasions. They allow women and homosexuals in the clergy. They perform gay wedding ceremonies. Most of the people who attend are liberal, politically speaking. They even let an evil heathen like me take communion. I think my wife thought I was going to see the light when I started attending with her. The people there are very open-minded and kind and I like them all. But it doesn’t make me a believer in any way more than I was before I met them. It’s more than just a question of choosing to believe. I am literally incapable of believing. It doesn’t matter how nice you are to me. If you don’t have hard, definitive proof of the supernatural, there is no way that I can believe in it. I’m from the show me state of spirituality. As far as I’m concerned, religion is a hoax.

I know that people have deeply personal reasons for being religious. I know that religion helps a lot of people find peace of mind. I know that religious people do a lot of good things in the world. I don’t have a beef with any of that as long as I can choose not to participate in religion. I’m very much live and let live on the issue as long as people are keeping secular law and religious law separate, and secular law is the law of the land.

It makes me sad in a way that I cannot fulfill my father-in-law’s desire for me to go into Masonry. The society has been loosening up over the years. Maybe someday soon they will be accepting of members whose higher power is the universe.