Freemasonry and the Church

[latterdaytemplar]

On 6/2/2021 at 2:43 PM, poptart said:

I'd add more to this but geez the other masons here did a better job with this than I could.  Sorry guys, school and clinicals suck.

For the Brother scholars here, I know there's a lot of back and forth over the endowment ceremony and blue lodge degrees.  Something I'm wondering, is it just US Freemasonry they go off of?  For one the Freemasonry they had then isn't the same now.  Even then the masonry we had back then was probably different from the UK variety and even more so from the continent.  Not all Freemasonry is identical, to say one group had the original degreework is folly I think considering just how much the craft has changed over the years.  Look at the Rosicrucians, we have them to thank for the Rose Croix degree of the Scottish Rite plus a lot of our own mysticism that sadly a lot of blue lodges either no longer have or claim they do to get new blood in then after being raised that's it.  Irony for me is there's a Rosicrucian branch of masonry in Utah that I think still does zoom meetings.  Utah really is saving everything lol.

 

This is a fair point. Not all ritual is the same. The jurisdiction of the United Grand Lodge of England alone works 80+ rituals (although this is not common; mostly each U.S. grand lodge jurisdiction employs their own singular ritual).

That stated, insofar as the similarities between the Church's temple endowment ceremony and the degree ceremonies of Freemasonry, I do believe that the best comparison would with the ritual of the Grand Lodge AF&AM of Illinois since that's the jurisdiction in which Joseph was initiated. Ritual seldom changes, especially within a single jurisdiction. I would be very surprised if the Illinois ritual were drastically different today from how it was back in Joseph's day.

Insofar as SRICF in Utah goes, they might be meeting in person now; our blue lodges are allowed to work in person as well as many appendant/affiliate bodies (i.e., York Rite); also, on a tangent, we might be opening up Utah's second AMD chapter here in St George soon, so I'm pretty excited. 😁

Edited June 10, 2021 by latterdaytemplar
minor grammatical correction