The general principles of freemasonry are great - love, equality, friendship, and being a good person overall. I still don't understand why people think freemasons are some kind of cult or secret evil organization. They're very much the opposite.

If Masonry is a cult, why hasn't it been taken down yet? Oh, and many of the U.S. Presidents were Masons. George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Theodore Roosevelt, 16 in total.

You see?! This is what happens when stupid people think a FICTION book is real. You wanna know what the Masons do? They sit around, have some beers and shoot the ol gab. They're a fraternity, nothing more, nothing less, they just happen to wrap it up in a bunch of secrets and symbols.
I hate Dan Brown.

Don't hate the player, hate the game. I'm agreeing with you on mostly on this, but at least Dan Brown has some creativity, everything else about it seems like something I'm never going to read about.

* On the "Fact" page, Brown states that CERN "recently succeeded in producing the first particle of antimatter." But the positron (or antielectron), the first known antimatter particle, was identified by physicist Carl Anderson in 1932. In 1955 the antiproton was produced at the Berkeley Bevatron, a fact that is, oddly enough, acknowledged on Brown’s Web site.
* The character Maximilian Kohler, the director of CERN, says that GUT refers to "General Unified Theory . . . The theory of everything" (ch. 8). It actually is an abbreviation for "Grand Unified Theory."
* Langdon states that the Illuminati fled Rome after Galileo was arrested in the 1630s and "were taken in by another secret society . . . a brotherhood of wealthy Bavarian stone craftsmen called the Freemasons" (ch. 11). But there were no Freemasons in Bavaria prior to the mid-18th century. The Bavarian Illuminati was founded on May 1, 1776, by Adam Weishaupt, the first lay professor of canon law at the University of Ingolstadt. Galileo died in 1642.
* Vittoria Vetra, Kohler informs Langdon, "is a strict vegetarian and CERN’s resident guru of Hatha yoga." Langdon wonders to himself: "Hatha yoga? . . . The ancient Buddhist art of meditative stretching seemed an odd proficiency for the physicist daughter of a Catholic priest" (ch. 14). Although yoga is practiced by some Buddhists, all forms of yoga, including Hatha yoga, have their origin in Hinduism.
* Langdon refers to Edwin Hubble as a "Harvard astronomer" (ch. 19). Hubble had no association with Harvard University, either as a student or professor.
* Kohler’s secretary hears the director of CERN in his office "on his modem, his phone, faxing, talking" (ch. 28). Since the World Wide Web was invented at CERN (in 1990, by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau), it’s hard to understand why Kohler would be relegated to using a modem.
* Several characters are depicted trying to hear a "dial tone" on their cell phones (ch. 25, 32, 106). Cell phones do not have dial tones.
* Langdon marvels at "Michaelangelo’s famed spiral staircase leading to the Muséo Vaticano . . ." (ch. 31). The Vatican Museums are correctly known in Italian as Musei Vaticani, and the staircase was designed in 1932 by Giuseppe Momo, personal architect of Pope Pius XI.
* Passing some Swiss Guards, Langdon notices that they carry "the traditional ‘Vatican long sword’—an eight-foot spear with a razor-sharp scythe—rumored to have decapitated countless Muslims while defending the Christian crusaders in the fifteenth century" (ch 35). The ninth and last Crusade ended in 1272; the Papal Swiss Guard was established in 1506.
* Readers are informed that popes "died of exhaustion in an average of 6.3 years" (ch. 42). But when Brown was writing his novel (c. 2000), the papacy had been in existence for about 1970 years; divided by 264 popes, that is an average of 7.46 years per pope. Working the other direction using Brown’s average (subtracting 1663.2 [6.3 x 264] from 2000), we arrive at c. 337, the year of Emperor Constantine’s death. If we start with the pontificate of Leo XII (1878-1903), the nine popes prior to Benedict XVI averaged over 13.5 years per pontificate.
* The camerlengo, asked if he recalls the prayer of St. Francis, prays, "God, grant me strength to accept those things I cannot change" (ch. 43). But that is from the Serenity Prayer, usually attributed to Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971).
* The character Gunther Glick, a BBC correspondent, tells his photographer that "Rhodes Scholarships were funds set up centuries ago to recruit the world’s brightest young minds into the Illuminati" (ch. 63). But according to www.rhodesscholar.org, Rhodes Scholarships "were initiated after the death of Cecil Rhodes in 1902."

"Pope Urban VIII had rejected The Ecstasy of St. Teresa as too sexually explicit for the Vatican." That is also false. Bernini didn’t begin working on it until three years after Urban died in 1644; he completed it in 1652. Further, Langdon deems the sculpture—which depicts St. Teresa of Avila in spiritual ecstasy, based on a description in her autobiography—as pornographic, as it supposedly depicts the saint "on her back in the throes of a toe-curling orgasm." Going from bad to worse, Langdon interprets St. Teresa’s description of her mystical experience as "a metaphor for some serious sex."

This crude dialogue is easily matched by the audacious dismissal of historical fact in the service of Catholic-bashing. Kohler and Langdon agree, in an early conversation, that "outspoken scientists like Copernicus . . . [were] murdered by the Church for revealing scientific truths. Religion has always persecuted science" (ch. 9). This is not just false; it is libelous. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) was a canon at the Cathedral in Cracow, a loyal son of the Church who died after a stroke at the age of 70.

"Unfortunately, Brown is reinforcing a stereotype," stated Owen Gingerich, Senior Astronomer Emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and an expert on Copernicus, in an interview with the editors of Secrets of Angels & Demons. "Copernicus was a servant of the Catholic Church. He dedicated his book to the pope, and never suffered any personal reproach or persecution." Gingerich added: "In truth, it is extremely difficult to document anyone put to death as a heretic for introducing scientific ideas".

I agree with Jack Nicholson on this one. The Masons are no religion. They are simply a gathering of men who decide it's cool to make up symbols and remain very secretive about it. Plus, any religion that forcefully asks for money in exchange for their philosophy is most likely a cult.

It's funny that people don't like Scientology and thus apparently label it a cult, and the Freemasons do what's really the same thing and everyone says "nope, not a cult".

The difference is that scientology is elaborate, and freemasonry is not. To be a freemason, you only need one key religious belief: God. It doesn't matter what denomination is or what you specifically believe, because when you enter the lodge, you leave that at the door. Scientology is an elaborate religion that converts people to their ways. There's a big difference between an entire religion and a fraternity that shares one common religious belief in God. As to whether scientology is a cult or not, who knows. It's too mysterious to really tell what the truth is behind them.

Not necessarily true. Whether or not there is a central deity or god is up to local units just as much as anything else in Freemasonry.

To be fair, the word cult was just given to organisations as a derogative term used against those who had stranger or sinister beliefs or practises. So literally they arn't cults but I guess there are similiar attributes (symbols etc). Then again I wouldn't consider much of the above groups to be strange or sinister, I suppose it's down to personal opinion.

Don't wanna hijack the thread or nothing, but do you think that the number of people in a group determines whether that is a cult or not? I think the question is relevant...

Don't wanna hijack the thread or nothing, but do you think that the number of people in a group determines whether that is a cult or not? I think the question is relevant...

the morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed[1]