While 281 spellers compete
in the 2014 Scripps National Spelling Bee by spelling words that can make one's
head spin (“weissnichtwo” and “cabotinage” to name a couple), there are many
words we come across regularly that are commonly misspelled, according to the
Oxford English Corpus.
Monday, June 2, 2014
The Scotch-Irish Orangemen Connection to Masons
If you look at Klan or Masonic
literature in the 1920s and 1930s, you find a list of political concerns that
look surprisingly, well, Left-wing. Masons favored strict secularization in the
public schools, as a bulwark against Catholic incursions. They also fought hard
against foreign interventionism: Catholics, on the other side, were pushing for
armed US intervention against the anti-clerical Masonic regime in Mexico, and
later against the anti-clerical Left in Spain.
In the US and Britain, these
interfaith tensions focused on Masons and anti-Masonic conspiracy theories
declined in later years, but they remained strong elsewhere, particularly in
regions with populations derived from Ulster or Scotland. The Orange Order, so
powerful in such lands, is a close relative of Freemasonry.
The KKK Connection the APA and Masons
Similar Masonic precedents marked
the post-1915 Ku Klux Klan, which became a national US phenomenon between 1921
and 1926, drawing perhaps five million members at its height. And at this
stage, the KKK was at least as heavily devoted to anti-Catholic and
anti-immigration causes as to anti-Black racism. The Klan found its local
leadership in Masonic lodges, and especially among local clergy. In order to
appeal to Masons and other fraternal organizations, the Klan offered a rich
mythology and heraldry, with all the mystique implied by its hierarchy of
“Hydras, Great Titans, Furies, Giants, Exalted Cyclops, Terrors,” its
distinctive secret language, and an elaborate system of progressive
initiations, of signs and countersigns. (I published on this at some length in
my 1997 book Hoods and Shirts).
It’s an oddity of US political
history that histories of the mighty Klan of the 1920s pay so little attention
to the APA, which was its immediate ancestor.
American Protective Association
Also known as the American Protestant
Association) . . .
Although not well remembered today,
the great American popular movement of the late nineteenth century was
the American Protective Association, which preached
radical anti-Catholicism, and prepared to resist a feared Catholic coup d’état.
Founded in 1887, the movement’s support ran into the hundreds of thousands at
least, chiefly in the Midwest. Its founder was Henry F. Bowers, a Freemason, who
structured the movement on Masonic lines, with regalia, oaths and initiations.
The APA oath
specified that,
I do most solemnly promise
and swear that I will always, to the utmost of my ability, labor, plead and
wage a continuous warfare against ignorance and fanaticism; that I will use my
utmost power to strike the shackles and chains of blind obedience to the Roman
Catholic church from the hampered and bound consciences of a priest-ridden and
church-oppressed people; that I will never allow any one, a member of the Roman
Catholic church, to become a member of this order, I knowing him to be such;
that I will use my influence to promote the interest of all Protestants
everywhere in the world that I may be; that I will not employ a Roman Catholic
in any capacity if I can procure the services of a Protestant.
Masons vs Catholics
MASONS
AND CATHOLICS
May 23, 2014 By Philip Jenkins
I have been posting on the pervasive influence of Freemasonry in Anglo-American culture. Usually, that tradition was very wide-open and generous in terms of its racial and religious attitudes, but there is one enormous exception to that rule, and that concerns Roman Catholics. Indeed, much of European and American politics over the past two centuries has involved a running and often bitter confrontation between Masons and Catholics. Why is that?
As a social and political movement, modern Freemasonry developed
in the British Isles, in the early eighteenth century. It was devoted to the
idea of brotherhood, and admitted anyone who could subscribe to belief in one
God, however that figure was imagined. Christians, Jews and Muslims all
qualified under that criterion, as did any Hindus who could assert that the
various gods of that faith were manifestations of a higher monotheism. . .
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Freemasonry became the principal vehicle for militant secularism and
anti-clericalism. Those struggles almost led to overt civil war in France in
the Dreyfus years, and they actually did spark armed violence in Spain and
Mexico in the 1930s. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that if you ignore
Freemasonry, you have no hope of understanding Mexican history over the past
century or so. Meanwhile, Masonic support of Jewish emancipation in Europe
provoked reactionary denunciations of the “Masonic-Jewish” conspiracy, which was later expanded to include Bolsheviks.
Protestants enjoyed the great advantages of the Masonic order, in supplying mutual support in times of trouble, and also in creating invaluable networks in business, law and government. Feeling themselves excluded, the growing immigrant population (mainly Catholics) created their own pseudo-Masonic counterparts, most successfully the Knights of Columbus, which dates from 1882.
Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2014/05/masons-and-catholics/#ixzz33Ur3j500
Why do students get summers off? It's not the reason you've always heard...
It’s commonly believed
that school kids started taking summers off in the 19th century so they’d have
time to work on the farm. Nice as that story is, it isn’t true. Summer vacation
has little to do with tilling fields and more to do with sweaty, rich city kids
playing hooky and their sweaty, rich parents.
Before the Civil War, farm
kids never had summers off. They went to school during the hottest and coldest
months and stayed home during the spring and fall, when crops needed to be
planted and harvested. Meanwhile, city kids hit the books all year long—summers
included. In 1842, Detroit’s academic year lasted 260 days!
Hebrew vs Greek
Why do Catholics and Protestants
have separate Bibles?
Hint: It has something to do
with Hebrew versus Greek and mostly a disgruntled German priest . . .
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