You prefer a God that is so incompetent he has to be present when creating something. I prefer a God that doesn't need to do the work but lays the foundation and the work gets done by itself. I love architecture, I love designing something and giving them paper and see them go do it. Doesn't mean I am not the creator, I stepped away and let them 'implement' it. God stepped away and let nature implement his design.
Cognissance, I will destroy you intellectually. U believe the quran must be read in the 7th century, I believe peoples understanding must grow of the quran not remain stagnant. Just cause the earth doesnt change dont mean my understanding of it won't. It grows and so should yours you dumb ass
Dr. Joseph Fort Newton, the most gifted and inspiring of Masonic writers fifty years ago, chose to believe that the tragic story of Hiram was long in the possession of operative Masons from the Middle Ages down to the dawn of Speculative Masonry in the 17th and 18th centuries. This I seriously doubt, since no mention of Hiram is to be found in any of the Old Charges and Gothic Constitutions, or in any of the remnants of old ritualistic practices to be found in the records of operative lodges which date from 100 years or more before the founding of the first Grand Lodge, which marks the beginning of the era of modern Speculative Freemasonry in 1717 . Had there been even a shred of evidence that the Hiramic legend existed in Masonry before that date, I feel sure that Dr. James Anderson would have known of it and used it in the legendary history of the Craft which he published in The Con-stitutions of the Freemasons in 1723.
Furthermore, modern Masonic scholars have shown rather conclusively that there was no tri-gradial system of initiation during the period of operative Masonry, that there was no third or Master Mason Degree as a rite or ceremony before the creation of the Premier Grand Lodge in 1717. The first recital of the Hiramic legend as the dramatic cornerstone of a third or Master Mason's degree appears in an expose of the ritual of Freemasonry entitled Masonry Disseeted, written by a Samuel Prichard and published in London in 1730.
Consequently, it seems a logical conclusion to assume that the Master Mason Degree, and with it, the legend of Hiram Abiff, were in-troduced into Freemasonry when it became a speculative, or philosophic organization.
Just where did the legend of Hiram come from? No one really knows; scholars have yet to discover its origins and its introduction into Freemasonry. My own scholarly prejudices lead me to believe that it's a re-working of some mediaeval mystery play, whose original may yet be discovered in a private library or the rubbish of an ancient building.
Mystery plays were the most popular form of public entertainment in the Middle Ages. Each guild or trade had its own preferred dramas; most of them were Biblical in origin. They were produced, staged and acted by members of the guild, first in churches, and then in public squares, to which they were banished when the plays became too boisterious and irreverant for the sacerdotal authorities.
These drams were called mysteries, not because they treated of witches, ghosts, or detectives, but because they were produced by craft guilds or "mysteres," which is variant of the French word "mestaire," a craft or guild. So the plays became known in England as mysteres, or mysteries, because they were pro-duced by "mestaires," or guilds. The expres-sion, "the mysteries of Freemasonry," therefore, originally meant the ritualistic ceremonies, or work of the Lodge.
To Masons who thirst for historical certain-ty about Hiram Abiff and his position in Masonic ritual, I can only give a dusty answer. It's not really important.
It's a mistake to consider the Hiramic legend as history. There was a Hiram Abiff in history, but our Third Degree is not interested in him as such. The drama of Hiram is a con-flict of a man with other men, of an individual against evil forces embodied in other men.
Hiram Abiff is the dramatized symbol of the human soul-of mine, of yours, of every man. The work he was engaged in is symbolic of the work which you and I are committed to perform in the supervision, organization and direction of our lives from birth to dissolution. The enemies that Hiram meets are really sym-bols of those lusts and passions and failures of the spirit which in ourselves and others make war on our characters and spiritual aspirations.
In my opinion, this symbolic increment to the Hiramic legend was added by one of the Speculative Masons of the early Eighteenth Century, by someone with the education and philosophical attainments of a man like Dr. John Theophilus Desaguliers or other Rosicru-cian adept.
Hiram's death was also his triumph--as the resurrection of truth over ignorance is always a victory, in spite of its being buried for a while in the rubbish of scorn and deliberate persecu-tion.
This is the real importance of the legend of Hiram, that it still stirs men to serve the Truth by steadfastly maintaining the necessity of their noblest aspirations, even to apparent defeat in death, out of which can arise a more perfect Living Perpendicular!
Edwin Booth, the famous actor and loyal Mason, was no mean judge of the essencc of tragedy; he evaluated the Hiramic legend in these words:
"In all my research and study, in all my close analysis of the masterpieces of Shakespeare, in my earnest determination to make those plays appear real on the mimic stage, I have never, and nowhere, met tragedy so real, so sublime, so magnificant as the legend of Hiram. It is substance without shadow-the manifest destiny of life which requires no pic-ture and scarcely a word to make a lasting im-pression upon all who understand. To be a Worshipful Master, and to throw my whole soul into that work, with the candidate for my audience and the Lodge for my stage, would be a greater personal distinction than to receive the plaudits of people in the theaters of the world."
http://www.masonicworld.com/education/articles/THE-IMPORTANCE-OF-THE-LEGEND-OF-HIRAM-ABIFF.htm
Dont go to far with kaftaan
L
