Just about finished with the book I'm reading on Freemasonry.

Normally, it's not a thing I like to read about, because any author motivated enough to write a full book on it inevitably is a conspiracy theorist, whereas I feel like it's interesting and influential enough historically on its own.

This author started out by debunking common conspiracy theories, and was like... "These are all bullshit and here's why...", but ended with "why my crackpot conspiracy theory is obviously the correct one".

Freemasons require belief in God to join, but there's no requirement on a specific religion (outside of that it be monotheistic).

However, religion and religious practices aren't allowed to be discussed, much less practiced, during meetings, and freemasons aren't supposed to try and convert one another as a rule to whatever religion they hold (I've got one friend who's a member and Muslim, but most are Christian).

The Mormon church is opposed to it's members becoming masons, but freemasonry is silent about Mormonism.

My thought is that it's got some good motivators on self improvement and charitable tendencies and fraternity in it's modern firm, and had been punching above it's weight in colonial and early America in terms of influence (and parts of Europe, of course, before and during). And as far as a lot of the secrets go, like... Y'all do you, but I find a lot of the rituals just silly sauce even if some are trying to teach lessons through allegory or keeping the thing close knit and cohesive. I mean... It's better for the world if people in the boy scouts go on to be masons rather than join the military, but that's sorta how I see it from what I know of the thing.

But the problem is that anti-masons see it as behind every bad thing and masons see their influence in all sorts of historical stuff they had nothing to do with. People just interested in the order that don't want to join to find out secret society stuff are pretty unrepresented in good material on the thing.