The Campaign for Philosophical Freedom

"Such, however, is still [the Church's] influence that this book, which tells the story of the past honestly and fearlessly, will be kept out of our schools and universities by the authorities, and consequently, only in later life will those with enquiring minds discover the truth."

"Mr. Arthur Findlay, who ranks among the leading historians of our day, has now given us The Curse of Ignorance, a lucid history of mankind from primitive times to the end of the Second World War - a truly monumental task. Throughout this competent and very readable work he strives, in vividly written pages, to show how ignorance and selfishness have led to wars, resulting in untold misery. All will agree with him as to the need for increased knowledge and an advance in our ethical standards." - Staffordshire Advertiser.

"Mr. Arthur Findlay has given us a compendious and most lucid work. Any writer who can credibly complete such a task has achieved no mean feat, and this Mr. Findlay has certainly performed. We cannot withhold a feeling of gratitude from a writer who has the monumental energy to give us 2,328 vivid pages marked by almost Gibbonian role but less verbosity. Here we have history of quality." - Wolverhampton Express and Star.

It's mainly about Christianity, it's birth and development, but in order to even start discussing it, we first have to look at the development of the Saviour-God religions. These sprung up in many countries that practised sacrifice as a religious ritual, and we can count 16 'Christs' in the Middle/Near East/Mediterranean areas leading up to the Jewish Christ, all having the same basic elements to their life stories. For example, a Babylonian tablet from circa 2000BC reveals the life story of the Babylonian Christ, Bel, or Baal to the Hebrews, (who when fighting the Philistines had thus been fighting supporters of the Babylonian Christ) in the instructions for the scenes of their mystery play, performed by them at our Eastertime. Nobody believed this stuff had ever actually occurred, and they would have doubted the sanity of anyone who thought that the various scenes of what was an obvious myth had really taken place.

Babylonian Legend:
Bel is taken Prisoner
Bel is tried in the Hall of Justice
Bel is smitten
Bel is led away to the Mount
With Bel are taken two malefactors, one of whom is released
After Bel has gone to the Mount the city breaks out into tumult
Bel's clothes are carried away
Bel goes down into the Mount and disappears from life
A weeping woman seeks him at the gate of burial
Bel is brought back to life

Death, I am told, is as easy and as simple as going to sleep and then awakening. Our etheric body slips out of the physical body, carrying the mind with it, and we awake to our new surroundings to find our friends and relations ready to help and instruct us in our new life. Death is simply the severance of this etheric body or structure from the physical body. The physical body returns to earth, and the etheric body, controlled by the mind, continues to function in the etheric world which, though within and also without the physical, yet cannot be appreciated by us so long as we are inhabitants of the physical body. Our range of sight and touch is too confined for us to appreciate these finer vibrations.

Here in this world our bodies are dual; physical, which we can see and touch; etheric, which we cannot sense with our physical organs. These two bodies interpenetrate each other, but the etheric is the permanent, enduring one, the etheric mind being the abode of our memory, personality, and all those qualities which make up our character. Those qualities pertain to the etheric. The mind never grows old, only the brain -- the mind's instrument -- which becomes impaired as the physical body grows old. Nothing we have learned, no intellectual wealth acquired, is ever lost.

Here we lose, in time, the power of expression; but this is due to the physical instrument ceasing to function with its aforetime precision. When, after the death change, the worn-out garment is laid aside, we stand, clothed in an etheric body, in our new abode. Freed from the limitations of the physical, our faculties are clear and movements more rapid. In the change we lose nothing of value; we are still ourselves in form and feature, in thought and action. Those who have lost arms or legs will have them again, as it was only the physical which was lost, and the same with all the other bodily disabilities. [Findlay's footnote: The individual mind in the etheric world obtains in time such control over the etheric body that bodily deformations can be removed and cured by thought.] The physical is but the covering; it is continually wasting away and being renewed by the blood, which is another proof that there is a permanent structure to which physical matter is attached.

The child who leaves this earth as such grows to manhood or womanhood, and when this stage is reached remains a fully-grown developed man or woman. Old age pertains to the physical, but it is unknown in the etheric. Children in the etheric world are carefully cared for and educated; there they have their schools and colleges; in fact the desire for knowledge is the outstanding desire of all who seek for progress, be they children or adults. And what of the old who die? Do they who live long enough to die with all the disabilities of old age retain those throughout eternity? If we could only comprehend that the etheric body never grows old, but only the physical body, this question would not be asked. When the old and tottering body is cast aside the etheric duplicate stands erect, freed from its outward physical handicap.

The old die old only in the physical sense, but enter the next life young. Age there is not measured in years, as time there differs from ours ....

The man and woman of average intelligence perceives the new environment without much delay, some almost immediately, on the passing of their etheric bodies out of the physical covering, though with others it may take days or weeks, as we measure time.

Our etheric body is in every respect a duplicate of our physical body. This may seem strange at first, and I found it difficult to grasp until I understood the fact that the etheric is the real body on earth, and that from the moment of conception it has gathered round it physical matter, slowing vibration. Otherwise it could not have functioned in the physical world owing to its finer and more rapid vibrations.

The physical body is only a protective covering for the etheric during its passage through the earth life. In reality, our real hands here are etheric hands clothed with a glove of physical matter, and so with all the other parts of the body. Our real brain is the etheric brain, through which the mind functions, and it acts through this whether we are in this world or the next. The mind acts on the etheric brain, and the etheric brain on the material covering which we call the physical brain ....

We are really much greater than we think we are, very much so; our mind as expressed through the physical brain is very limited, and only when freed from the physical do we comprehend its greatness. Our earthly mind we call conscious mind, but it, and what we term the subconscious or subliminal mind, form a complete mind. Our conscious mind directs our activities in this world, but our greater mind functions in the next. We obtain only glimpses of this greater mind in the occasionally observed phenomena of telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience and prevision, and on these occasions the subliminal over-rides the conscious for a limited time and then withdraws.

Some day, as man develops, the subliminal may become more and more a dominating factor, but at this stage of our development its intrusion is sporadic and confined to the few. When we pass on, our earth memories pass with us, but slowly they fade and we are guided and governed by this greater mind which has been with us all our lives building up our bodies, performing its inward functions, and making us what we are, though we know it not.

"I am one of the first to admire the unselfish social work of many clergy in the slums and elsewhere, but these activities are quite apart from those with which this book is concerned. Many others besides the clergy of the orthodox faith are engaged in missions to the poor. It is not the social side of the Church's work that this book attacks, but orthodox Christianity as preached from nearly every pulpit in Christendom, and it is this which affects the great majority of the people."

"If I were not able to put before the people a better religion, a truer religion, and a greater religion for them to observe and follow, I would not trouble to attack what is false, as it gives a certain measure of comfort to many. Spiritualism, however, is an infinitely greater help to us in our lives and also in our deaths than the old faiths which satisfied our ancestors. My wish is not to knock down and destroy. My aim is to build a nobler edifice, but before this edifice can be built decaying rubbish about its foundations must be cleared away."

'Truth, whether in or out of fashion, is the measure of Knowledge. Whatever is beside that, however authorised by consent, is nothing but ignorance or something worse.' - Locke. Findlay chose this quote carefully for the title page of a book which in 1933 was one of the first to present to the popular reading public a truthful, historical account of the rise of Christianity, and emphasize the difference between the historical Jesus (assuming he existed merely on the principle of cause and effect, there to this day not being a scrap of historical evidence he actually existed) and the biblical Jesus, as well as Jesus' original message versus the one put into his mouth over three centuries by early Christian scribes. These alterations, plainly evident when comparing early versions of the Gospels, reflect the changing (and clearly man-made and borrowed) Christian doctrine until the Council of Nicaea fixed these evolving scriptures in 325AD. To consider these man-made books to be the Word of God is possibly the greatest blasphemy against any Creator one could make, to be exceeded only by equating this Infinite Intelligence with the murderous, immoral Jehovah.

For those who doubt these results of decades of research by Findlay, consider that in September 1933 he published a challenge to all the Protestant clergymen in Great Britain and Ireland, 28630 of them, to expose any errors or misstatements in The Rock of Truth. A copy of the newspaper in which the challenge was published was personally mailed to every one! A footnote in The Unfolding Universe, which is the third book in the trilogy (the first having been On The Edge of The Etheric), states that no reply had been received after 15 years. That's simply because Findlay didn't make any of this stuff up. It all came from published works in Theology and Religious History that most Christians are completely unaware of, but which are old news to theologians and biblical scholars.