This can sound polemic, but I think no one can be a true believer if they've never had doubts. As a child, it's impossible to understand what God and faith are, and the relations you have with them. A child's belief in God is closer to pagan superstition than to actual faith. At least in my case, my faith had to be reborn in a more adult form. It's normal to have doubts, and it's good to question everything; you're distilling your faith.
The consequences of my past three years of inadequacies are finally coming to haunt me. Anons, pray for me so I can emerge a better man out of this. And please, pray for my cousin; she's doing terribly academically. She's only got a few subjects left to finish high school, but after having to repeat courses twice, she seems to have abandoned herself. I don't want her to suffer through a life devoid of meaning, please pray so she will muster strength to get her crap together and close this overextended period of her life. I love her dearly and I don't want to see her suffer and wither as another victim of our terrible education system.
"Resist not evil". Resitance will make you dwell on it. I discovered it when going no-fap, the thoughts would slip into my mind at every possible time, and I ended up thinking about it more than before. Do not resist it, just ignore it. Easier said than done, though.
I'll pray for your faith to be reborn after your crisis, new, more pure and stronger.
I'll pray to you becoming able to have healthy interactions with the opposite sex.
Self loathing is the previous state to really accepting Jesus. I'll pray you'll come to love Him and appreciate your life, for it allows you to love God and be loved by Him.
A while ago, when I wasn't even christian, I looked into joining them. You have two branches: the regular/orthodox and the liberal/adogmatic.
The first one (regular freemasons, associated with the Scottish rite) is more traditional and hierarchical, more organized. Lodges have to be reviewed by their national lodge for approval, and to form a new national lodge, the approval of other national lodges is required. They're more strict, require members to be believers of some monotheistic religion, and doesn't accept women in their ranks. You also need to be capable of sustaining yourself to join, and are required to make regular donations (pay membership fees).
The liberal lodges (french tradition) are more free form. To form a new lodge, you only need approval of two or three more lodges, which leads to all kind of wacky stuff. Some don't even hold the three basic requirements to be a freemason (believing in one God, not talking about politics and having a penis). If you see freemasons in a political demonstration, they belong to this group, since regular masonery prohibits lodges to have a political stance (at least in the surface, they're supposed to work only for the spiritual well being of their members or something like that). Liberal masonry is basically like protestant freemasons, a disperse mess of beliefs and parallel structures. The most blatantly disgusting lodges come from this group.
Now, what do freemasons believe? Basically, gnosticism. Their "religion" (or philosophy or how you may want to call it) is pretty much alchemy without mixing stuff. You can become exalted or ascend or get greater or something like that just by knowing, thinking about the mystery of life and trying to know God. For people like that, Jesus is a teacher, not a savior (His death on the cross would mean nothing if you can be saved by your intellect). Faith is also purely intellectual, and works wouldn't be necessary for salvation. For Christians, that's deeply problematic.
Now, you can read masonic texts and they may help you reflect about the nature of God, nothing (too) wrong there. The main problem with freemasonry and the gnostic viewpoint is not so much that it's wrong as it is incomplete and negates the rest of human existence and salvation. They may have some interesting ideas here and there, things to think about, but they don't have a worldview one could live by. Gnosticism has been debated at length in other posts, so I won't dwell on it here. Search about it if you wanna know more.
Ultimately, the main reasons for not joining depend on the branch of masonry. For liberal masons/french rite, the problem is that it's bonkers. It's like a mason met a new-age hippie boomer and met a non-denom pastor and they all formed club together. For regular freemasonry of the British rite… well, looking at the membership fees should start to make you suspicious. One of their aprons can be at least $350 or so. It ultimately is a rich-men club to LARP and do rich-men stuff (like, for example, plotting).
So, is masonry evil? Yeah, sometimes. It's never good, that's for sure. Ultimately, most often, it's just a waste of time.
Hope that helped, anon.
"7 Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. 9 God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us." 1 John 4:7-12