Wayfarer
Registered User
(I won't vote on this as I am not a Freemason, but...)
Looking at the history of your order, it would seem the problem is not hate but what is hated and why. Jonathan Swift and Voltaire (though Voltaire came to the Nine Sisters Lodge very late in life) both can be said, very fairly, to have been filled with hatred -- but for what? Ignorance, superstition, intolerance, among other things. Ben Franklin had a sort of hatred for intolerance and superstition as well, and for moral viciousness and political enslavement. Mark Twain, both in his stories and in his (now) less widely read essays, had an open hatred for intolerance, ignorance, meanness, self-righteousness, hypocrisy, imperialism, buncombe,....
I do not mean, in any of these cases, that these men found these things "a bit irritating" by using the word "hatred"; I mean that they had enmity for these things -- these were their enemies, the things against which they fought in the name of other, positive values.
"To enlarge the sphere of social happiness is worthy of the benevolent design of a Masonic institution; and it is most fervently to be wished, that the conduct of every member of the fraternity, as well as those publications, that discover the principles which actuate them, may tend to convince mankind that the grand object of Masonry is to promote the happiness of the human race." George Washington
That, I take it, is a nice, short statement of the aims of Masonry - "to promote the happiness of the human race." So hatred for all that is actively opposed to that happiness would seem both appropriate and actually exhibited in the lives of some of the greatest members of your fraternity.
Hatred is an energy; what one does with that energy determines the goodness or badness of the action, morally.
Looking at the history of your order, it would seem the problem is not hate but what is hated and why. Jonathan Swift and Voltaire (though Voltaire came to the Nine Sisters Lodge very late in life) both can be said, very fairly, to have been filled with hatred -- but for what? Ignorance, superstition, intolerance, among other things. Ben Franklin had a sort of hatred for intolerance and superstition as well, and for moral viciousness and political enslavement. Mark Twain, both in his stories and in his (now) less widely read essays, had an open hatred for intolerance, ignorance, meanness, self-righteousness, hypocrisy, imperialism, buncombe,....
I do not mean, in any of these cases, that these men found these things "a bit irritating" by using the word "hatred"; I mean that they had enmity for these things -- these were their enemies, the things against which they fought in the name of other, positive values.
"To enlarge the sphere of social happiness is worthy of the benevolent design of a Masonic institution; and it is most fervently to be wished, that the conduct of every member of the fraternity, as well as those publications, that discover the principles which actuate them, may tend to convince mankind that the grand object of Masonry is to promote the happiness of the human race." George Washington
That, I take it, is a nice, short statement of the aims of Masonry - "to promote the happiness of the human race." So hatred for all that is actively opposed to that happiness would seem both appropriate and actually exhibited in the lives of some of the greatest members of your fraternity.
Hatred is an energy; what one does with that energy determines the goodness or badness of the action, morally.
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