Dear Unknown Friend,

More than a year has passed since imposed my year and one day of silence. Today I break that silence. I’ve not come to any solid ideas on how or whether to continue using this forum. It has benefits, it has (the ability to expose my) risks.

In either case, I upgraded to the latest version of wordpress, and behold I’ll have to pull content out of archives to restore it here. I do apologize to any of you who hold an interest in my – how was it termed – bloviations.

Today I found myself thinking about an old observation of mine – the language of Grand Lodge Codes. I don’t purport any expertise in evaluating language or Grand Lodge Codes. However, I do have a concern about the language in some Grand Lodge codes – Negative focus.

By definition a Code communicates a set of moral and ethical expectations, and discloses the retribution for violations there of.

I invite you to review your Grand Lodge’s Code, and count the number of offenses it takes to loose a Lodge charter. Now count the number of ways to obtain a charter. Compare those numbers. I think you’ll find the number of ways to loose a charter greatly out numbers the ways to obtain one.

My point, I suspect you’ll find more effort is spent in the Code describing the ways to offend our common sense of morality than is spent on ways to support it.

My concern is the psychological impact of a governing document which focuses disproportionately on offenses to a moral code. What sort of world view is fostered by a society whose governance originates from a position that guides one to avoid offenses, instead of satisfying the expectation?

Just an observation, no conclusions or calls to action.