Nebraska, Hawaii, Montana, Alaska, North Dakota

Five more states and my Flag Counter will be full. If there are any Freemasons, Jews, job-hunters, or people interested in these things in Nebraska, Hawaii, Montana, Alaska, or North Dakota, please visit this site. I know that it's a bit cheap to solicit visits this way, but please indulge me.

Job hunting again: LinkedIn for Masons

My work contract ends at the end of October. I'm in job-hunting mode again. I work with Health Level 7 (HL7), a data protocol for transferring medical data over the Internet. In my last two jobs, I built and maintained data routes that pumped HL7 ADT (admit, discharge, transfer) data from hospitals and medical clinics to data centers.

I have a BA in Creative Writing and Literature, and an MS in Mathematics and Computer Science, with a Pure Mathematics focus. I have taught math at the high school and college levels, edited math textbooks and websites with mathematical content, maintained and customized document recognition software before doing what I currently do. Even though medical data skills are in high demand these days, I'm willing to consider other career paths.

I'm going to make a plug for LinkedIn, a website that helps with job networking. I have a profile there, and I've already found a few nibbles. One feature that really helps with networking is their Groups feature. Join as many groups as you can. Here's why.

On LinkedIn, if you add someone as a contact, but they reject you as a contact, you get a black mark on your record (they think you're a spammer). Get enough black marks, and you can't add contacts without presenting their email addresses. Get more, and you get kicked off the site. Thus anyone you add as a contact without their permission can hurt your reputation on the site. That's not a bad thing, but one has to be careful cold-calling people, even people who might be good to network with. If your target is a contact of yours, you can freely communicate with them. If they are a contact of a contact of yours, or a contact of a contact of a contact of yours ( 2 or 3 deep), you can get an introduction through your contracts. Otherwise they are out of reach.

But if you both belong to a Group, you can contact them within the group. There are dozens of masonic groups, Scottish Rite groups, Shriners groups, Jewish groups, Therapy Dog groups (my dog is a Therapy Dog through Therapy Dogs International), alumni groups, professional groups, even fans of different operating systems, computer languages, sports teams, you name it. You can search for people in your field through your group connections. You can even look for jobs, and see if anyone from your groups or contacts works there.

Masonic etiquette: I've heard other masons say that they add any mason as a contact who asks them to. This is commendable if due trial, strict examination, and lawful information has been gathered about the contact. The internet has its cowans, and the Recession has people looking for any angle to get a new job, so brothers are advised to be careful. If you see a network target who has masonica on his LinkedIn page, and you share a group together (especially a masonic group), it's not unreasonable to send him a message like "Brother A.B.: I am a brother at <lodge> Lodge #n in <town>, <state>, and I noticed that our career interests overlap. Please consider adding me as a contact. If you know of any employment opportunities that match my skill set, I hope you will consider me. Sincerely and Fraternally, Brother <you>."

Some groups ask you state your lodge, your office in that lodge if any, and maybe answer some questions from the lectures before allowing you to join them, or they might write to your lodge secretary to see if you are a current member. That's a good thing. You want them to tyle their group properly. The group might take a week or so before adding you. That's not cause for alarm.

If you want to add me as a contact, use the email form on this blog page to contact me. Good luck and good fortune to all of us.

An Open Letter to Atheists

Dear Atheists:

Even though I am a religious Jew, I'm not your enemy. Really, I'm not. I was raised secularly, and spent a lot of my life without faith. For most of that time, I considered myself agnostic, but I never believed in an angry bearded anthropomorph in the sky (and still don't), and I would consider myself to have held implicit atheistic beliefs in my past. I still have many close friends who are both implicit and explicit atheists, and we respect each other enough to have respect for each other's beliefs. Because Judaism is a complex umbrella of ethnicity, culture, religion, spiritual practice, and de facto grouping, there is no conflict of interest to be an atheist Jew. I have atheist Jews who go to synagogue with me, and they are as welcome as anyone else there. Some will even fast for Yom Kippur, not out of any religious devotion, but as an expression of cultural identity. An atheist Jewish friend of mine defines Judaism as: "When they come to round up all the Jews, if they get you, you're a Jew." While more paranoid than my own personal definition, it does illustrate a point. Jews are not evangelical, and even if you wanted to convert to Judaism, a rabbi would try to talk you out of it unless you had your heart set on it.

I wouldn't even need to write this letter to you, except for a disturbing trend I see within your ranks, that has me concerned, especially because I want to extend an olive branch to you, and this trend makes me hesitate to do so. I am tolerant of other religions to the extent that they are tolerant of me and my faith. I have Muslim friends whom I love and support, but when Hamas says that Jews are descended from pigs and rats, I withdraw my support. I have Christian friends, and I admire their faith, but I do not admire those who claim I am damned to Hell for rejecting Christ, nor those who accuse me of killing Christ. Tolerance has to be reciprocal, or it doesn't exist. I love and support my atheist friends as long as they don't regard all faith as a sick delusion that has to be stamped out of human consciousness. My worry is that I'm seeing too many of you go from atheism to antitheism to intolerance of theism, and I don't like to share my community with bigots of any stripe, theist or atheist.

It's hard to be an atheist. The overwhelming majority of people believe in God, and it's easy to feel outnumbered and overwhelmed by those of faith. Believe me, as a Jew in the USA, I know what it's like to feel outnumbered and overwhelmed, and in Australia it was considerably worse. I experienced being forced to have a Christian religious education, to be told daily that I was damned, to be rejected, suspected, and condemned, and worst of all, to be treated as alien by otherwise well-meaning people. In your history, you were subjected to the same persecution as the Jews, Cathars, Rosicrucians, Swedenborgians, Sufis, Ishmaelians, Yazids, Druze, Quakers, Unitarians, and other minorities who believed differently from the faiths of the majority. The previous President of the USA vocally doubted whether you could be true citizens. That sucks. In some regions, you face discrimination at work, ostracism in your communities, and in other parts of the world, imprisonment or death.

There have been moments where atheists have been in control of their nations, but so far those have not been happy memories either. In the USSR, the League of the Militant Godless had state support, and sought to teach people that they did not need gods in order to live a fulfilling life. In their zeal, they destroyed churches, synagogues and mosques, and ended up imprisoning and murdering people. In Albania, every place of worship was ceded to the state, and converted to secular community centers. Priests, rabbis and imams were sent to re-education camps. It became a criminal offense to teach any religious thought or practice, making it the only state in the history of the world to actively seek to obliterate religion from its territory.

Like state religion, state atheism is horrible and inhumane. Any forced ideology exists through violence rather than reason, and a reasonable person opposes any forced ideology of intolerance, whether towards, or away from religion. That religions have, in their history, committed far more atrocities than those committed by atheists, does not make any of those crimes condonable or justifiable.

Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Communist, grew up in Sardinia. He watched the Young Sardinia movement emerge, modeled after the Young Turks movement. He saw Sardinians develop a political movement based on a Sardinian identity, and saw they had a chance of overthrowing their Piedmontese (Italian) occupiers and establishing a Sardinian state. Then he noticed that the movement was bankrolled by the local landlords, who were starving the local peasantry with brutal rents, and harsh reprisals for late payments or disobedience. That is when he asked himself: if the Young Sardinians take power here, will they be kinder, or more just than the Piedmontese? Would he be any freer than he would be under the status quo? That's when he realized that who ruled was not the only matter of importance, but how they ruled was equally important (by using that same logic, he ultimately later rejected Communism).

So how do we assure that you can live lives free of oppression? Because if you aren't free, you may gain power and enslave me some day, so I need you to live a life where you are secure in your liberties in order to be secure in mine. Here in the USA, we have had an interfaith tolerance written into the Constitution, but throughout our history, it has been a struggle to live up to that tolerance. If you actually look at the language, it is more than interfaith, but extra-faith as well:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...

That means that respecting an establishment of religion is beyond the power of the state. If we truly live up to that sentiment, it should be beyond our power to compel another's faith or lack thereof. This is the essence of tolerance: that I believe what I believe, you believe what you believe (or don't believe), and neither forces the issue. We live in peace together because we do not try to coerce each other. I pray every day, and go to synagogue and pray with others who are there willingly, and you don't have to. However you may personally feel about my practice, you are enlightened enough to assume that, in my current level of enlightenment, I need it to function, and do not seek to deprive me of my needs. You may privately feel that such needs are pathetic, but you are compassionate enough not to interfere. You are gracious enough to let me be, and you may have faith that if I seek to improve my mind, I may one day reach your level of enlightenment and cast off my belief system, but you do not force my hand. Reciprocally, I may privately see you as stunted and deprived, starving for spiritual truth, and may feel that you are playing out old emotional damage by creating a deity of your bitterness and giving it non-existence as a form of catharsis, and that the real God is patiently waiting for your tantrum to end in order for you to see God again and reunite with your Creator, but I also understand that by so doing, you are healing, and I do not interfere with your process (I don't actually think that of most of you, but I'm being rhetorical here).

The point is that tolerance is allowing others to believe things you think are wrong, and respecting their processes enough to allow them to work things out on their own. Obviously there are places where tolerance ends. If I feel that God wants me to strap dynamite to my body and blow up a shopping mall, I should be prevented from doing this as expediently as possible. If you feel that I require a lobotomy because I believe I have a personal relationship with the Creator of the Universe, you should be prevented from having your way. There are going to be gray areas, like the Jewish practice of B'rit Milah, or the education of children, but we can negotiate these gray areas in a respectful manner if we develop the practice of tolerance for the clearcut cases.

In religious communities, the idea of interfaith dialogue is a hot idea right now, and it's a good idea. Most Jews and Muslims have no idea how many points of similarity we have together. Jews and Christians have a lot of tragedy and reconciliation to process, having come from a common source. We may see the reintegration of Catholicism with Orthodox Christianity in our lifetimes. Tolerance depends on mutual understanding, and we have seen many religions in the USA that previously excluded and oppressed lesbians, gays, bisexuals, the transgendered, and those questioning their sexualities welcoming them back into the fold (The United Church of Christ has done great work here). Although Christians once regarded (and many still regard) homosexuality as a terrible sin, some Christians are able to be tolerant, and by so doing, have won many to their faith. There is nothing like respecting a person as they currently are to earn their respect. There is no reason that a dialogue between believers and unbelievers, in the interest of tolerance, can not take place.

So my plea to you is to be tolerant of others, and to encourage others to be tolerant of you. People who think differently from you will think things that annoy you, but if you can communicate with them in an atmosphere of mutual respect, please do so. I know that many religious people are so intolerant of your beliefs that they cannot meet you half way. You are under no obligation to be tolerant of such people. But please understand that not all religious people are your enemies. Some of us love you and respect you, and want to earn your love and respect as well.

This blog is moving to a new address

I've been invited by Greg Stewart and Dean Kennedy to join their excellent website Freemason Information. I've been enjoying their podcasts for a year now, and I was delighted that they created their website, which has among its contributors and commentors some of the most interesting masons in the blogosphere.

Therefore I was deeply honored that they invited me to be one of their regular contributors. I will continue this blog on their website. My first post is here. This is cobbled from old posts on this blog, updated to be contemporary to new readers. Please continue to read my blog on Freemason Information, rather than at this URL.

Thanks,

Jeremy.

The Destruction of the Temple

Tomorrow night begins Shabbat Chazon, the Sabbath immediately preceding Tisha B'Av, the saddest day in the Jewish calendar. Jews remember the destruction of Solomon's Temple by King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon. It is also the anniversary of the destruction of Zerubbabel's/Herod's Temple by the Romans. It's also the anniversary of:

• The twelve scouts of Canaan returning from their mission with exaggerated tales of how mighty the Canaanites were. Because of the general panic of the Israelites in the desert over these false tales, God doomed the Israelites to wander in the desert for an additional 40 years, and condemned them all to death in the wilderness, allowing only those born in the desert to reach the Promised Land (except Joshua and Caleb).
• The failure of the Bar Kochba revolt, the last Jewish king to rule in Palestine.
• The razing of Jerusalem by the Romans, and the final ancient exile of the Jewish people from their homeland.
• The expulsion of Jews from England in 1290.
• The Alhambra Decree of 1492, expelling the Jews from Spain.
• The expulsion of the Jews from Vienna, 1670.
  
• The start of World War I, 1914.
  
• The mass deportation of the Warsaw Ghetto Jews to Treblinka Extermination Camp, in 1942.
  

Some of the later anniversaries were not accidents. The Tsarist Russians and Nazis would often time their massacres for Jewish holidays to further demoralize the Jews, and the irony of exiling or murdering us on Tisha B'Av was not lost on many of the Jews' historical enemies.

Oddly enough, the Messiah is supposed to be born on Tisha B'Av. This strange midrash is supposed to provide encouragement, that even on the Jews' saddest day, there is a glimmer of hope.

Because Solomon's Temple was destroyed on Tisha B'Av, this anniversary is a Masonic day of mourning as well. Every mason, and especially every Scottish Rite Prince of Jerusalem, would do well to have a moment of silence on Thursday to remember what we lost.

Orthodox Jews are prohibited from observing Holocaust Remembrance Day (post-Talmudic rabbis do not have the authority to create new days of observance, not until the Messiah gives them that permission), so they remember the Nazi Holocaust on Tisha B'Av.

This year, Tisha B'Av falls on a Wednesday night, and continues until an hour after sundown on Thursday. Traditional observance includes the harshest kind of religious fast for these 25 hours:

1. No eating or drinking of any kind, save life-saving medicines.
2. No washing or bathing.
3. No applying of creams or oils, except if medically necessary.
4. No wearing leather, especially not leather shoes.
5. No sexual relations. Some refrain from physical gestures of affection of any kind, even going so far as not to greet others during this time.

Reading the Bible is forbidden (because that can be joyous), except for the books of Lamentation, Job, and parts of Jeremiah that address the destruction of the Temple. One is forbidden to sit in a chair until after noon, sitting on the floor instead. Some people sleep on the floor without a pillow the night of Tisha B'Av. Old or damaged prayer books and Torah scrolls are given a funeral and buried, the same way that old or damaged flags are burnt on Flag Day. Work is to be avoided, if possible.

There is an evening synagogue service, and the entirety of the Book of Lamentations is sung. The cantor we had last year began sobbing in the middle, and someone else had to take over. Like I said before, it's a very sad day.

Last year, Tisha B'Av fell on a Saturday night to Sunday night. I observed all of the mandatory rules, which was easier because of the weekend. This year, it falls on a work day, and I'm more conflicted. My heart wants to follow all the observances, but two things interfere. One: I have a go-live with a major medical practice at my job, and I'm a contractor, so I don't get holidays. Our client has 9 branches, all of which are going live on Thursday, and I'm the project lead. If I fast, I'm going to be a mess when I need all my mental acuity. Two: I'm moving this weekend through next week, and I don't want to fast and do heavy lifting. I'm really conflicted as to what to do. I need a good night's sleep for my go-live, so I might go to services, but not observe the fast. I feel like a bad Jew, but I'd rather not be an unemployed, homeless Jew on top of it.

Pike gets me thinking

I'm reading Albert Pike's Magnum Opus, or the Great Work for The College of the Consistory. I'm enrolled in the School of Perfection (4° to 14°) for the next two years, but since I've mailed off my initial assignment for the School of Perfection, and am waiting for my next assignment, I thought I would read ahead.

It is important to note that I am in the Valley of Boston, Northern Masonic Jurisdiction (NMJ) of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite (AASR), and Albert Pike was Sovereign Grand Commander of the Southern Jurisdiction (SJ). We respect Illustrious Brother Pike in the NMJ, but he was never our leader, and our ritual and degree titles are different from his vision of what they should be. The Southern Jurisdiction is the mother jurisdiction of all Scottish Rite jurisdictions in the world, but this was established before Pike was born, and it is not at all clear that SJ exerts any authority over other jurisdictions. The book he is best known for, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, or Morals and Dogma for short, is a difficult read and compares a lot of different faiths without singling any one out for special praise. That makes fundamentalists very uncomfortable, and anti-Masons love to misquote Morals and Dogma to make their point about Freemasonry in general, falsely claiming that Pike was the world leader of all of Freemasonry, an office that does not exist. In the NMJ, we can side-step the controversy by pointing out that Pike did not write our degrees, and that he has never had any authority over the NMJ. I'm not sure our bitterest enemies, especially the proponents of the Taxil forgery and the Three World Wars crowd, care very much about facts.

In any case, Morals and Dogma gives the reader the following warning:

In preparing this work, the Grand Commander has been about equally Author and Compiler; since he has extracted quite half its contents from the works of the best writers and most philosophic or eloquent thinkers. Perhaps it would have been better and more acceptable if he had extracted more and written less.

Still, perhaps half of it is his own; and, in incorporating here the thoughts and words of others, he has continually changed and added to the language, often intermingling, in the same sentences, his own words with theirs. It not being intended for the world at large, he has felt at liberty to make, from all accessible sources, a Compendium of the Morals and Dogma of the Rite, to re-mould sentences, change and add to words and phrases, combine them with his own, and use them as if they were his own, to be dealt with at his pleasure and so availed of as to make the whole most valuable for the purposes intended. He claims, therefore, little of the merit of authorship, and has not cared to distinguish his own from that which he has taken from other sources, being quite willing that every portion of the book, in turn, may be regarded as borrowed from some old and better writer.

The teachings of these Readings are not sacramental, so far as they go beyond the realm of Morality into those of other domains of Thought and Truth. The Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite uses the word "Dogma" in its true sense, of doctrine, or teaching; and is not dogmatic in the odious sense of that term. Every one is entirely free to reject and dissent from whatsoever herein may seem to him to be untrue or unsound. It is only required of him that he shall weigh what is taught, and give it fair hearing and unprejudiced judgment.

I have to be very careful here. My brothers at the Guthrie Scottish Rite Temple have been very generous in letting me study their courses, and I am very grateful to them for their gift of masonic light. I am also loyal to my mother valley and mother jurisdiction. SJ has its Master Craftsman program, and the College of the Consistory is a SJ program, but I'm not aware the NMJ has anything similar. If I were aware of a NMJ program that invited a brother to study their degrees in depth, I would take that program in preference to a SJ program, because I'd be studying my own degrees instead of an extra-regional variant. A visit to both jursidictions' websites reveals nearly 50 books for sale at the SJ website, and only one at the NMJ website, and that book is not about Scottish Rite Freemasonry. I'm still very new to the Scottish Rite, so I assume that we at the NMJ are a bit more guarded about masonic education, and I will be invited to study and learn when I prove myself worthy. Until then, I am glad that other opportunities have been afforded to me, and it is my sincere hope that the light I gain from these SJ programs will go some way towards making me worthy of whatever educational program the NMJ offers its brothers. It is most sincerely not my intention to offend my NMJ brothers by studying SJ ritual, and it should not be interpreted as a preference for SJ practices over NMJ practices.

In Sovereign Grand Commander George Newbury's history of the NMJ, he notes that the NMJ at one time made the Rose Croix (18°) degree Christian-only, a restriction that Ill. Bro. Newbury rejected and dropped. He also notes that Pike was deeply unhappy about this restriction. Pike writes in Magnum Opus: "If, anywhere, brethren of a particular religious belief have been excluded from this degree, it merely shows how gravely the purposes and plan of Masonry may be misunderstood. For whenever the door of any degree is closed against him who believes in one God and the soul's immortality, on account of the other tenets of his faith, that degree is Masonry no longer. No Mason has the right to interpret the symbols of this degree for another, or to refuse him its mysteries, if he will not take them with the explanation and commentary superadded."

It is fascinating how Pike expounds on Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, with one Council of Kadosh degree in the explicit idiom of each, and insists that Knights Kadosh have to learn about each of the major Abrahamic faiths and go through a degree in the mode of each faith in order to achieve the title. He also speaks about Masonry's compatibility with Buddhism and Hinduism, even calling the Buddha a mason. His liberties with masonic history rankle the more historically-minded Freemasons I know, but he is careful to explain that he is being allegorical, and he is expounding on archetypal truths, not historical truths.

(UPDATE: I found this explanation in the Master of the Symbolic Lodge lecture (20°):

We teach the truth of none of the legends we recite. They are to us but parables and allegories, involving and enveloping Masonic instruction; and vehicles of useful and interesting information. They represent the different phases of the human mind, its efforts and struggles to comprehend nature, God, the government of the Universe, the permitted existence of sorrow and evil. To teach us wisdom, and the folly of endeavouring to explain to ourselves that which we are not capable of understanding, we reproduce the speculations of the Philosophers, the Kabbalists, the Mystagogues and the Gnostics. Every one being at liberty to apply our symbols and emblems as he thinks most consistent with truth and reason and with his own faith, we give them such an interpretation only as my be accepted by all.)

This little nugget from the Secret Master (4°) lecture I'm sure would rankle other masons:

If you have been disappointed in the first three degrees; if it has seemed to you that the performance has not come up to the promise, and that the common-places which are uttered in them with such an air, the lessons in science and the arts, merely rudimentary, and known to every school-boy, the trite maxims of morality, and the trivial ceremonies are unworthy the serious attention of a grave and sensible man, occupied with the weighty cares of life, and to whom his time is valuable, remember that those ceremonies and lessons come to us from an age when the commonest learning was confined to a select few, when the most ordinary and fundamental principles of morality were new discoveries; and that the first three degrees stand in these latter days, like the columns of the old, roofless, Druidic Temple, in their rude and primeval simplicity, mutilated also and corrupted by the action of time, and the additions and interpolations of illiterate ignorance. They are but the entrance to the great Masonic Temple, the mere pillars of the portico.

As someone for whom the Middle Chamber lecture, as I received it, stole my heart, this does not sit well with me. How many of my brothers actually study the seven liberal arts? How many masons do you know still put an apostrophe before every final s? Brother Esquire insists that Pike loved the first three degrees, but was deeply critical of the Preston-Webb versions of them. I'm also aware that the Morals and Dogma version of this lecture is less harsh than this. But even still, I don't reject this paragraph out of hand. While any contemporary mason will tell you that there is enough in the three Craft degrees to satisfy a lifetime of curiosity, I understand the yearning to explore further degrees and bodies, and the Scottish Rite has a marvelous opportunity to satisfy this yearning in its brothers.