Welcome to HAM'S collection of
downloadable  files of Freethought Literature! This part of the site is currently being updated, so at the moment the application needed to decode these files is not available. Please return soon for further details.

Below are descriptions of and links to disks and files of freely downloadable Freethought literature! It's a pleasure to be able to make them available to you  from our Massachusetts Humanist Association web site. As with all down-loadable, please read closely the accompanying literature below. This literature is an integral part of these diskettes and files. Happy Trails!

WELCOME TO FREETHOUGHT
(May 13, 1994)

There is a table of contents, CONTENT.DOS, file on the last disk of this series, you may want to look at that to see what is available and where to find it. As of this date there are 10 1.44k disks in this collection of Classic Freethought works, and more titles will be added as time goes by. The files are in ASCII format and can be read with BROWSE, a public domain program, that we include on every disk for your convenience. Files that have an .EXE extension is a self extracting compressed file. There is not enough room on the distribution disks to execute the compressed files and they must be transferred to a hard drive, or to an empty floppy that has the capacity to receive the expanded file, before they can be expanded. The size of the files are given in the CONTENT file on the last disk. To expand the file just type the name of the file, the .EXE is not necessary, and the file will magically produce several files with a .DOS, or .D, extension. To read a file with BROWSE just type "BROWSE.COM FILENAME.DOS" and the book can be read and the text can be moved up or down, line by line or page by page.

Most of these computerized Freethought books were reproduced for the Bank of Wisdom by Emmett F. Fields in order to circulate this needed information to the general public. However, we will add other Freethought works that are in public domain, and we encourage everyone to copy and distribute Bank of Wisdom files. The Bank of Wisdom also reproduces xerox copies of Freethought works and we are in the process of collecting Freethought magazines, pamphlets, etc. on microfilm to recapture Freethought history. Any contribution sent to BOW will be used to promote Freethought and to further this important work.

We make a sincere effort to see that the books are copied word for word, but there may be an occasional error in our work. If you find any important goof let us know and we will eliminate it in future issues. Also all electronic files on read-write media can be altered by any person whose hands they pass through, so be sure the copies of these files comes from a reliable source. We must ask that orders from the Bank of Wisdom be accompanied with a donation to cover material and shipping. You will find the following message reproduced in most Bank of Wisdom files, it is our statement of purpose.

**** ****

Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.

The Bank of Wisdom is a collection of the most thoughtful, scholarly and factual books. These computer books are reprints of suppressed books and will cover American and world history; the Biographies and writings of famous persons, and especially of our nations Founding Fathers. They will include philosophy and religion. all these subjects, and more, will be made available to the public in electronic form, easily copied and distributed, so that America can again become what its Founders intended --

The Free Market-Place of Ideas.

The Bank of Wisdom is always looking for more of these old, hidden, suppressed and forgotten books that contain needed facts and information for today. If you have such books please contact us, we need to give them back to America.

Write us at: Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201

Notes on accessing Freethought Disks
(This is Readme2.Dos on disk 10)

All EXE files are compressed and need to be loaded to a Hard Drive before they can be expanded. All ten disks require approximately 12M of disk space, still compressed!

To make copying easier, I made (on my computer) a Freethought books directory I called FREELIT and then made 10 sub-directories called; DISK1, DISK2, DISK3, etc. so that I could use the Copy *.* command when duplicating them.

Volume label on the orginal set of disks was WISDOM94A. There are some errors on the disks; mostly machine errors, such as line feeds, but also I detected some typos. As these errors are corrected, I (we) need to up-grade the volume label, from a to b to c, etc. The 94 is the year that I last copied it. I have removed some errors on the original, compiled a Contents.DOS file and added BROWSE to each disk for easier access. This set of disks is volume WISDOM94F

To access the files after you put them on your hard drive, using my example, type C:\FREELIT\DISK1, ENTER. I then type the name of the file, i.e., ING01 and the file will expand giving several file names xxxx.DOS or xxxx.D. The DOS files are in ASCII format.

If you want to look at a file, type BROWSE FILENAME.DOS. Be careful to manage your disk space. You may want to limit expanding the files to DOS files one .EXE file or disk at a time.

The Ingersoll files (Disks 1-3) will print out to almost 5200 pages! I haven't added up the other 7 disks, yet.

Congratulations on now possessing a fine Freethought library; a larger collection than are in most libraries. I hope you will copy them and give them to school and public libraries all around your area. This makes a great Chapter project. Don't forget to reward yourself with a personal copy! Thank You.

Emmett Fields has spent several years and several thousands of dollars putting these Freethought books on computer, just to make them available and easily accessible to the public. He has done, and continues to do, a great service to the Freethought movement. I know of no other person who is doing more to introduce Freethought literature to the public as a means of defeating censorship and ignorance. It is obvious he has no financial gains in mind, but it would be nice if we would support his efforts a little. Call or write him to ask how you can help in this effort. Even a donation to help defray some out-of-pocket expenses would be welcome.

His address is: Emmett Fields 514 Eastern Parkway Louisville, KY 40217-1818 (502) 634-0590

Some suggestions on how to make this set of disks very useful for getting public attention for Freethought literature:

•     Put copies in your local high school
•     Put copies in your local library
•     Give copy to editors, producers, writers and other media people that you come in contact with.
•     Bring up in conversations that you possess this great collection on computer disk, especially to young people.
•     Because this is public domain literature, include as much as you like in essays, books, etc. that you write. In this format, it is easily imported into most any DOS word processor program.
•     Rearrange and combine a number of these writings, or parts of them, according to author, cause, philosophy, chronology, etc., to form a book. Many of these writings are not in the Library of Congress or public libraries because they were published as pamphlets, not books. By combining them into books, libraries will carry them.
•     Distribution efforts make great chapter projects. See if you can get them into the hands of teachers, for instance. Perhaps the chapter would consider buying disks in quantity. I am buying 3.5" HD disks for 40 cents each!
•     Make excerpts on older disks to wet the intellectual appetites of young people who may not have computers with hard drives. All the data has to be in DOS format and fit on one disk. Emmett Fields suggested using old disks with some bad sectors in this manner (the whole disk in not needed for only a few pages of material). He even suggested "dropping" them where students would find them and would take them home to check them out (Stealth Approach).Include the BROWSE.COM file on every disk for easy use.

Editors, Producers, Writers & other Media people: This set of Freethought titles are a few that will demonstrate how biased the media really is today. One must remember that the victors write the history books, the dominant culture writes the news and the dominant religion claims to have all the correct moral answers. This attitude perpetuates maintaining the status quo and a repetition of past mistakes. The purpose of distributing freethought literature in this form (electronic) is that it is the most difficult to censor because it is cheap & easy to distribute, can be reproduced by almost everyone with a computer and exposes those who read it to evidence that they have been manipulated with lies, distortions and half-truths to conform to the dominant society. It's time people stop accepting news and accounts of the past on blind faith. It's time people who can think become skeptical of accounts and analysis of past actions and face the real world, where actions are usually motivated by personal gain. What happened to the five W's? Has all media succumbed to the tabloid mentality of emotional appeal only? much of the crime today is because people have lost touch with reality. Morals are no longer based on reason and historical evolution, but on emotional appeal without regard to others. Religion still bases its appeal on the carrot & stick approach, based on ancient superstitions and ignorance. Ethics is no longer based on "the Golden Rule' but on what one get away with in their quest for power or material wealth. Why has our society degenerated so badly? Because the media (newspapers, cine', TV and even books) have utterly failed to keep their focus on the real causes of things, preferring instead to exploit only the result. When we learn about how we have been manipulated through the ages, we learn of skepticism. When we accept information without skepticism, we accept it on blind faith; ignoring the mistakes of history; ignoring the laws of nature in the real world. This set of disks is a beginning, to get the attention of media people and Freethinkers through the country. It is an effort to bring sanity back into the news mainstream; to create more skepticism; to get the media to look again at the five W's. All of this literature is now public domain; the copyrights have expired, or have been compromised by the publisher. They were written at a time in our history when the media and society was much less censored and more skeptical than it now is. You can get a feel of the depth of our present level of censorship by examining this literature and ask yourself if it would even be possible to print most of it today, without creating an outrage! I have access to much more such literature, but most has not yet been computerized. Please contact me if you are interested in learning more about media censorship, more Freethought literature sources and the Freethought movement in general.

Frank Prahl, AHA Field Developer, P. O. Box 5888, Pasadena, TX 77508-5888
(713)479-6829

Synopsis of the 10 Free Thought Disks
Download complete disks as zip files
or
parts of disks as individual files on the 10 subsequent pages.

To see a more detailed description of a disk, and to download it, click on a disk number.