Freemasonry and the Noahide Laws both promote the naturalist religion of the Antichrist

The following is Part IV in a series on Catholic teaching on the rise of the prophesied Antichrist. Read Part I here; Part II here; and Part III here. 

(LifeSiteNews) — In the last part, we considered the “Seven Noahide Laws.” Here they are, as expressed by 12th century rabbi Maimonides:  

1. the prohibition against worship of false gods; 
2. the prohibition against cursing God; 
3. the prohibition against murder; 
4. the prohibition against incest and adultery; 
5. the prohibition against theft; 
6. the command to establish laws and courts of justice. 

[…] The prohibition against eating flesh from a living animal was added for Noah.^[1]

The Jewish religion holds these seven Laws to apply to all mankind. The Torah (“the Law”) represents a specific covenant between God and a chosen people, and it is not necessary to be a part of this covenant for the gentiles to have “a portion in the world to come.”   

On the contrary, the respected Rabbi Elijah Benamozegh has said, “the concern is for Gentile observance of the ancient religion of Noah, the only religion which is incumbent on all who are not Israelites.”^[2]  

This is why the enormously influential twelfth century rabbi Maimonides states that, in the supposedly messianic era to come, the Gentiles “will all return to the true faith” – namely, that faith of which Judaism and the Noahide religion are the respective expressions for Jew and Gentile.^[3] 

Compatibility 

Are the Noahide Laws intended to be compatible with other religions?  

The Noahide paradigm holds that the Jewish people remain “the light to the Gentiles,” and so it should be clear that these Laws will be interpreted and administered according to presuppositions of the Jewish religion.  

This paradigm holds that Noahidism is essentially the first religion given to mankind, and that Judaism is merely a specification of it for the Jewish people.  

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Some writers seem to suggest that the observance of these minimalist Laws, without any great number of rites or prayers, constitute the entirety of the religion possible and permitted for gentiles.^[4] Given the minimalism of Noahidism, it seems reasonable to think of it as a “practical” or “partial” deism – a form of naturalism closely linked with the Enlightenment and Freemasonry – in which God is detached from the individual Noahide. 

Others writers suggest that other religions can be compatible with the seven Laws, and thus can either be legitimate in themselves, or can be “purified” so as to become compatible.^[5]  

This former idea is very similar to the outlook taken by Freemasonry.^[6] It is also similar to that of “perennialism,” which holds that there is a “transcendent unity of religions,” and that “[t]he differences between the religions are as providential as the aspects they have in common” and that “[t]he true and revealed religions were all sent by, refer back to, and grant access to, the same Absolute Reality.”^[7] 

It is unclear whether, in the Noahide paradigm, the toleration or existence of so-called “ethical monotheisms” is to continue in the supposedly “messianic age.”   

However, in the last piece, we saw that a significant school holds that Trinitarian Christianity is incompatible with the Noahide Laws and the Noahide religion, because it is construed as a species of idolatry. As such, it is either illegitimate and unacceptable – or in need of “purification.”  

Having considered the matter from the Noahide and Jewish perspectives, the focus of this piece is to look at the matter from the Christian perspective, and ask whether the Noahide religion is compatible with Christianity.   

We shall see that it is not compatible. Christianity is fundamentally opposed to the presuppositions of Noahidism, and for reasons which place the Noahide religion uncomfortably close to what is expected in the religious system of the Antichrist.   

Rationalism & naturalism 

Even though some writers say that the Noahide Laws must be accepted because they have been revealed, Noahidism is manifestly a naturalist religion, imposing only an obligation to monotheism and a set of laws discernible by natural reason.  

The respected Rabbi Elijah Benamozegh speaks of the “fundamentally rational quality of Noahism” and writes as follows:    

[T]he Israelite is presumed to be ignorant of the Law as long as he has not been expressly instructed in it; but this excuse cannot do for the Noahide, whose conspicuously (indeed, exclusively) rational code is accessible to the human conscience.^[8] 

In one sense, this presents the Noahide religion as the codification of natural law. It is certainly true that much of morality is knowable in this way. It is also certainly true that the existence of “God, the origin and end of all things, can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason from the created world.”^[9]  

Prior to and apart from supernatural revelation, natural philosophers such as Aristotle demonstrated much that is correct about God and morality through the use of natural reason. This is the subject of “natural theology,” which is quite distinct from naturalism.

Although these laws are all knowable through reason, some Jewish authorities state that, in order to be meritorious, they must be observed specifically because they have been revealed by God as well.

However, the positive exclusion of the objective divine revelation of Christ, and the redemption which he has wrought for us, makes the Noahide religion a religion of rationalism and naturalism in the sense defined by Fr Denis Fahey:  

Naturalism consists in the negation of the possibility of the elevation of our nature to the supernatural life and order, or more radically still, in the negation of the very existence of that life and order. […]  

Naturalism may be defined therefore as the attitude of mind which denies the reality of the Divine Life of grace and of our Fall therefrom by original sin.   

It rejects our consequent liability to revolt against the order of the Divine Life, when this life has been restored to us by our membership of Christ, and maintains that all social life should be organized on the basis of that denial.^[10] 

Rationalism and naturalism have been the key ideologies advanced since the so-called Enlightenment and French Revolution. One principal form in which naturalism has been advanced is the so-called “liberty of religion/worship” and the “separation of Church and state.”  

By this is meant the denial that both civil society and each individual have duties towards God and the true religion – and instead, the claim that all citizens and groups are equally free to worship in accordance with their own religious principles, without regard for the true God or true religion. 

This naturalism, including in relation to civil society, is fundamentally incompatible with the Catholic religion, and has been repeatedly condemned by the Church. In 1889, Pope Leo XIII drew attention to the number of times that the latter has been condemned by the Church, and called it “the legal apostasy of society from its divine Author.”^[11] 

This is because, even at its “best,” naturalism relegates Christianity to one of many possible or permitted religions, and treats supernatural revelation as mere opinion and a private affair. It uncrowns and dethrones Jesus Christ as the Incarnate God and King, and at most offers Him a place in a pantheon of gods or wise religious teachers.   

This is precisely the offer rejected by the early Christian martyrs, and against it, Fr. Fahey writes: 

We must combat that mentality [of naturalism] and proclaim the Rights of God.^[12] 

In addition, this naturalist de-christianization of the state were and remain key tenets and aims of Freemasonry, as Fr. Edward Cahill writes:  

Freemasonry sets up a code of morals and a principle of human virtue and beneficence independent of God; and while it affects to ignore Our Divine Lord, or where circumstances require, pays a homage of lip service to His sacred Name, its very essence is opposition to Him and to His mission on earth.^[13] 

Naturalist ‘purification’ is impossible 

The ideas expressed by Fr. Cahill are precisely what we hear proposed by advocates of the Noahide religion – who would have us “purify” Christianity from the dogmas of the Holy Trinity, the divinity of Jesus Christ, His redeeming sacrifice on the cross and its application to us for our sanctification in the New Covenant and the Catholic Church. 

However, such a “purification” is necessary for Christianity to “return” to the Noahide religion from which it has supposedly departed.  

But this involves the fundamental denial of the most basic dogmas of the Christian religion, even if it paid lip service to Christ and retained existing terminology. Further, as mentioned previously, this idea of “purifying” the Christian religion by redefining and rethinking what is meant by her dogmas is impossible for Catholics.^[14] It is also precisely how the theologian Pietro Parente defines the system of “modernism” condemned by Pope St Pius X:  

A heresy, or rather a group of heresies […] with the pretense of elevating and saving the Christian religion and the Catholic Church by means of a radical renovation. […] 

[A] hybrid amalgamation of verbal Catholicism with real naturalistic rationalism…^[15] (Emphasis added) 

This “Noahidation” of Christianity is not a “purification” or a return to the pristine religion of Noah, but rather naturalism and apostasy.  

Freemasonry and the Noahide religion  

There is a great similarity between the Noahide religion and that which is proposed for mankind by Freemasonry – or which Freemasonry proposes as the “meta-religion” behind all other “true” religions, and with which all religions must conform. 

Both Noahidism and Freemasonry claim to present a more pristine and ancient religion than Christianity – or at least to facilitate a return to this supposedly true universal (or “catholic”) religion. For instance, in the classic masonic text, Morals and Dogmas of the Accepted Scottish Rite, Albert Pike writes: 

Humanity has never really had but one religion and one worship. This universal light has had its uncertain mirages, its deceitful reflections, and its shadows; but always, after the nights of Error, we see it reappear, one and pure like the Sun.^[16]

Both Noahidism and this Freemasonic “universal, eternal, immutable religion”^[17] are “merely ethical” and naturalist systems, presented as a perennial set of rational truths.  

Both entail what Leo XIII called:    

[T]he utter overthrow of that whole religious and political order of the world which the Christian teaching has produced, and the substitution of a new state of things in accordance with their ideas, of which the foundations and laws shall be drawn from mere naturalism.17     

It is also curious that the rites and mythology of Freemasonry are so centered on the building of the Temple of Jerusalem and the figure of Hiram Abiff (presented as the architect of Solomon’s Temple). In his book on the Antichrist and Freemasonry, Monsignor George F. Dillon links this allegory with naturalism and the de-christianization of society.^[18]

What is also striking is how similar the more esoteric doctrines of Freemasonry are to those of Kabalah, the dominant form of Jewish mysticism. The theme of Kabalah as the source of the “transcendent unity of religions” dominates the last third of the previously mentioned work by Albert Pike, who also says: 

All truly dogmatic religions have issued from the Kabalah and return to it: everything scientific and grand in the religious dreams of the illuminati, Jacob Boehme, Swedenborg, Saint-Martin, and others, is borrowed from the Kabalah; all the Masonic associations owe to it their Secrets and their Symbols.^[19]

Needless to say, none of this is compatible with Christianity. 

Based on this naturalism, Pope Pius IX called Freemasonry “the Synagogue of Satan” and “a synthesis of all the heresies and the rallying point of all the uprisings of man against God.”^[20]

Pope St. Pius X also links these different forms of naturalism with St. Paul’s warnings, and applies the text of 2 Thessalonians to the worship of man himself:  

[M]an has with infinite temerity put himself in the place of God, raising himself above all that is called God […] he has contemned God’s majesty and, as it were, made of the universe a temple wherein he himself is to be adored.^[21]  

Conclusion  

As a merely “ethical,” naturalist and anti-trinitarian religion, the Noahide system is utterly incompatible with Christianity.  

This is because Noahidism is not the “mere” monotheism of natural theology. As it is specifically anti-trinitarian, and given that God really is Triune, it entails a rejection of God to a greater or lesser extent.  

It specifically rejects the supernatural order established by Christ – and such a rejection entails the elevation of a natural order above that which God objectively established for the supernatural perfection and salvation of mankind. 

It also specifically rejects truths which God really has revealed – which entails the subjection of supernatural divine revelation to the natural judgment of Man.  

Fr. Denis Fahey once wrote of Freemasonry and naturalism: 

If we deliberately reject our divine Lord and His grace, we try to make ourselves superior to God. […] 

The final result to which initiation tends is the pantheistic deification of man.^[22]

The same applies to the Noahide rejection of Christ. Even aside from the Antichrist literally demanding divine honors for himself, the Noahide elevation of naturalism at the expense of the true supernatural religion itself constitutes what St. Paul prophesied:  

…Who opposeth and is lifted up above all that is called God or that is worshipped, so that he [representing “man”] sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself as if he were God. (2 Thess. 2.4) 

Because of this, it is clear that the Noahide religion and any so-called “ethical” religion without Christ, naturalism, religious liberty, state agnosticism, Freemasonry and modernism ultimately all converge together.

Their end point is the worship or cult of Man himself, and the belief that “all things on earth should be related to man as their center and crown.”^[23] 

As we shall see in the next part, this convergence is a key part of what Catholic theologians and mystics expect in the stages of the Antichrist’s religious persecution. 

LifeSiteNews’ Dr. Maike Hickson’s upcoming report inspired this piece. 

Post-script  

Considering the discussion above, we cannot help but find the below texts deeply troubling.  

Gaudium et Spes, Vatican II, 1965: 

According to the almost unanimous opinion of believers and unbelievers alike, all things on earth should be related to man as their center and crown.^[24]

Dignitatis Humanae, Vatican II, 1965: 

This Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.  

[…] This right of the human person to religious freedom is to be recognized in the constitutional law whereby society is governed and thus it is to become a civil right.^[25]

Paul VI, Address during the last general meeting of the Second Vatican Council, 1965 

Secular, profane, humanism has finally revealed itself in its terrible shape and has, in a certain sense, challenged the Council. The religion of God made man has come up against a religion – for there is such a one – of man who makes himself God.  

And what happened? An impact, a battle, an anathema? That might have taken place, but it did not. It was the old story of the Samaritan that formed the model for the Council’s spirituality. It was filled only with an endless sympathy. Its attention was taken up with the discovery of human needs – which become greater as the son of the earth (sic) makes himself greater. 

Do you at least recognize this its merit, you modern humanists who have no place for the transcendence of the things supreme, and come to know our new humanism: we also, we more than anyone else, have the cult of man.^[26] (Emphasis added) 

Francis, Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living together, 2019  

The pluralism and the diversity of religions, color, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings.(https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/travels/2019/outside/documents/papa-francesco_20190204_documento-fratellanza-umana.html)