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Let's look at this from a different approach, what would you consider school? To understand the Bible, one needs to to first go to school to know how to read. To understand it better, one needs to know how to use a concordance and history to understand what it says.

To understand Christ's commandments, Love the Lord your God, with all your heart, soul, and mind; love your neighbor as yourself. How do we love our neighbor? How do we treat our fellow man? How do we best serve? In all things in life, we learn the lessons from the lives of others. We know how to build a house because others before us have built houses and, through trial and error, have learned to build better houses. We each should not have to learn to build a house from scratch, instead, we should learn the lessons from those who came before us the best way to build the house.

How should we treat our neighbor, what is loving our neighbor? Should we start from scratch or should we learn the lessons from those who came before us?

As for ‘ritual’, how did you learn math? Were you given a bunch of instructions and told just to do it or, were you given word puzzles, rhymes, and other tools to help you remember the tables?

I don’t purify myself or sanctify myself by ritual. Religious ritual is not the same as rote.

To learn these things I read my Bible, I don’t pledge myself to any organization and thereby yoke myself to their authority, giving them the power to tell me whether I can ‘progress’ to the next degree of membership.

Christ forbade making such vows and enslaving yourself, with the exception of marriage, which was instituted by him. This kind of thing is EXACTLY what is going on in the apostate evangelical church these days, thinking that by getting people to make vows and follow stricter and stricter membership guidelines (dues/tithes, DOING more and more for the church programs, etc.) that that is what makes them more spiritually mature and sanctified. It completely fails to do that.

God, through his control of life’s events, and by our submission to His word alone (granted you may seek advice from good pastors/teachers but are never to be bound to them by a formal oath, what if they go off the rails or turn out to be false teachers?), the Word Alone is how the Holy Spirit works. The only ‘rituals’ if you want to call them that, which were instituted by Christ are the Lord’s Supper and Baptism, and there is much disagreement on those as well, and just what they accomplish.

I truly don’t want to denigrate my friends who are masons. I just see that there *are* religious elements that are incompatible with Christianity. I also see many so called Christian churches (see your other thread on Churchianity) who are teaching and doing things incompatible with Christianity.