The Campaign for Philosophical Freedom

by Michael Roll
This article was published in Psychic News, January 10, 1998

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The great thinkers of Greece invented the word psyche, meaning soul, in order to account for so-called paranormal phenomena. Something that was just as common in ancient Greece as it is today. However, it was not until July 1st 1871 that modern scientific thinking actually started to go down the same correct path taken by the scientists and philosophers of ancient Greece.

An article by Sir William Crookes FRS in the Quarterly Journal of Science, 'Experimental Investigation of a New Force', started the contemporary thinking revolution.

Even as long ago as 1871 orthodox scientific teaching had completely eliminated any thought of survival after death or a separate mind and brain. Therefore Sir William Crookes' experimental discovery of the "psychic" force threw a very large spanner into the works of scientific teaching across every discipline.

1871 was also the start of the scientific inquisition. Woe betide any scientist who made a move to bring survival after death out of the domain of religion and into subatomic physics - the study of forces that are beyond our five physical senses. War was declared on Sir William Crookes and the discoverer of radio, Sir Oliver Lodge FRS, together with any researcher who dared to follow in their footsteps. For example, the Society for Psychical Research was started in 1882 and was immediately infiltrated by materialists and religionists with a great deal to lose from the truth. This culminated in the official resignation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle MD in 1930 when he called some of his fellow members of the SPR "evil"! The way to destroy any organisation that is a danger to powerful vested interests is to infiltrate and wreck from within.

For well over 100 years psychologists have been fighting to be recognised as serious scientists. They have only achieved this goal by concealing the truth and blatant appeasement of the scientific establishment, especially the physicists and biologists:

"Pity poor psychology," it has been said. "First it lost its soul, then its mind, then consciousness, and now it's having trouble with behaviour."

Those fighting for philosophical freedom and a balance on media outlets dealing with the paranormal can take heart from an article by the President of the Society for Psychical Research that was published in The Paranormal Review in November 1997.

Professor David Fontana, a psychologist whose mind does not seem to be closed against survival after death, has written to the Director of Channel 4 Television complaining about the appallingly biased Equinox programme called 'The Secrets of Psychics' that was shown on August 24th 1997. Professor Fontana says:

"I am saddened to find that your production team should be responsible for such one-sided, misleading and ultimately anti-scientific material."

Let's hope that this starts to do the trick, and Dr. Susan Blackmore and Dr. Richard Wiseman no longer hold court on our television screens without any balance from scientists who disagree with their conclusions. Many scientists are fed up seeing Dr. Wiseman wasting his £150,000 grant messing about in haunted houses with ghostbusting equipment. This is just a daft as trying to see microbes without using a microscope or trying to see the invisible signals hitting aerials without using the mediums - our radio and television sets. It is completely useless trying to contact people in the invisible part of the universe without the use of a go-between, a human medium that is a much more sophisticated "machine" than any human invention.

Perhaps before long we will even see a scientist speaking on British television to millions who does not think that the President of The Royal Society, Sir William Crookes, was a gullible idiot who was dabbling in the supernatural. Maybe we will see a scientist who is adamant that the subject of survival after death is in fact something that is natural and normal - a branch of subatomic physics.

The day may even come when we see a real psychologist on our television screens who agrees with the ancient Greeks who invented the word psyche - that we all possess a soul and survive death.