As protests concerning the legitimacy of recent presidential elections in Iran continue, the complicated divide between conservatives and progressives is making itself more clear, and one of the subjects in which this is the case is the fate of the Baha'is.

Iranians are angry, with thousands upon thousands of protesters taking to the streets and occasionally setting vehicles on fire. They accuse president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of rigging the recent presidential election, and they question how that many ballots could even be counted in the short time the government claims it took.

My short answer, explained in a new article, is "no," Freemasonry is not a religion and, thus, will not get much airtime on the AltReligion site.

There are certainly those who will disagree with me, but I'm not going to categorize everything that some person calls a religion as a religion. I need a reason, and for me the reasons just aren't there.

First and foremost, Freemasons do not themselves call it a religion. I write primarily about what religious people do, and in the mind of Freemasons, what they are doing is not religious. I cover Scientology precisely because Scientologists do consider their practices religious, even though many of their critics disagree.

And what about those rumors of the very highest levels of Freemasons participating in Satanic or other overtly religious rituals? Not being a high-level Freemason, I have no access to such rituals...and neither do most people who level such accusations. Even if I did have access, it would be highly unprofessional of me to publish such things. Such supposed materials are for the eyes of a very few. Just because it might be interesting doesn't give me a right to it.

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Susan Atkins, a member of Charles Manson's "Family", is up for parole for the 18th time in September.

Most people have little doubt that Manson's group can be described as a dangerous cult (although an article by Denise Noe gives an interesting challenge to the idea). Manson was a charismatic leader who exerted extreme control over members of his group, up to and including ordering the brutal murders of several people.

That may be true. That doesn't suddenly give the cult members license to behave as they did. A CNN article states that "Charles Manson used his hypnotic powers to direct Atkins and other "family" members to kill seven people."

Charles Manson is not a supervillian. He doesn't have magical powers. He might have a convincing personality, but at the end of the day, everyone still has a choice whether they're going to listen. Manson's followers quite willingly joined him, enjoyed his company, and eventually accepted that murder was a good idea. This wasn't a case of Stockholm Syndrome.

Even if one argues that they surrendered control to the charismatic Manson, that was still a choice. Each of us is responsible for our own behavior. If we take drugs, we're still responsible for what we do in a drug-induced state. If we drink and drive, we're still responsible for the accident we cause while blitzed out of our mind. If we decide to blindly follow a leader, that doesn't somehow absolve us of that decision.

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