I know a couple of Masons and...same here. Nice guys...really just enjoying the pleasure of a sort of men's club, as far as I can tell. In my state, interestingly, they are practically disappearing. When a Masonic friend gave me a tour of their temple, there were photos of the members, especially of my friend, who was the Grand Whatever. (Can't remember what they call them). The main reason seemed to be that he was only about 62...every other member was in his 70s or older.
The Masonic group in this area has shrunk so much from deaths and non-replacement that they have actually put their temple up for sale. (That's a pity, because it happens to be a rather historic one, but they are so few that they can't afford to keep it up.)
I got the impression from an article in some reputable magazine (I only read reputable magazines!) that the Masons are greying so rapidly that they may have ceased to exist in this country in about 30 years.
The ones I saw at our local lodge would have had a lot of trouble roasting toddlers or offering them to Satan. A reasonably well-developed 3-year old could have laid them out with a medium amount of screaming and kicking.
Freemasonry has a wonderful history, although not the one they tell themselves about Solomon's Temple and Hiram Abiff. It certainly played some secretive parts around the time of the Reformation, as did the Rosicrucians, John Dee and his followers, the occultists of Prague, and so on. And their symbols and ideas have remained appealing. Many of you probably know that Joseph Smith was a Mason and that there are Masonic symbols on the SLC Temple. At some point the Nauvoo Temple, as it was being reconstructed, had a Masonic Compass-and-Square on the top, but that was quickly replaced with an image of the Angel Moroni when the LDS Church began distancing itself as fast as possible from its roots. (Part of this is because their secret endowment ceremony, which is not very secret anymore, is quite obviously lifted straight out of a Masonic rite.)
This is not to say that Aleister Crowley wasn't completely loony, but in my limited research it has appeared that he was trying to be quite original, not even remotely related to the Masons. He also got fairly far up the mountain K2 long before the Italians finally summitted. So all those drugs didn't damage him too much when he was youngish.