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Two weeks ago, two videos were removed from Youtube by TED Talks, made unsearchable on their website, and hidden in a back-corner blog posting. The two videos were "The War on Consciousness" by Graham Hancock, and "The Science Delusion" by Rupert Sheldrake (now reposted by independent sources).
The initial reasoning for taking down the videos, inspired by blog postings by various arbiters of the materialist inquisition, proved so flimsy and false (look at the strikethrough text) that TED had to retract their statements and re-issue their response and justification for their actions, simultaneously claiming that what they were doing was not censorship.
Supporters of TED's decision to take down the videos claim that it is not censorship and/or that it is TED's right to take down whatever videos they want. It IS censorship when TED deletes these videos from high traffic websites like Youtube, the videos are no longer searchable on its website, and it relegates the discussion and videos to a backwater/obscure location on its website. It IS censorship when certain videos are left up, which meet their same vague criterion of "psuedo-science", which are less inflammatory to the assumptions and goals of the dominant materialist paradigm. For example, Richard Dawkins' provocative and pseudo-scientific videos (he tries to pass it off as science, but his arguments are largely philosophical in nature) remain up! There is a clear double standard that favors one side of a debate. TED does have a right to take down whatever they want, but if they take down viewpoints that are not mainstream but leave up more mainstream viewpoints that meet the same vague criterion for "psuedoscience", they do not have the right to parade the flag of freedom of information and "Radical Openness" (which is, ironically, the title of TED's new book).
This incident has publicly exposed a cancerous and cantankerous force in the world of science that I have become acutely aware of in recent years, which usually lurks in the background, in the arcane texts of journal articles and technical literature. Despite all the progress, the evolution and development of the methodology of science, there is an inquisition that has arisen, which bears striking similarities (but opposite in belief system) to the Church-establishment of hundreds of years ago, which the first scientists fought desperately to break down. The Materialist Inquisition is a force that has resurrected the methodology of dogma to impose the idea that the Universe is meaningless and mechanistic, fixed in its laws, that matter is all that exists, that consciousness is just an epiphenomenal illusion. These dogmas are proudly paraded under the banner of science by unquestioning followers, while behind the scenes, many of the primary promoters of these ideas go against the very foundational values of science by choosing to ignore, misrepresent, or silence opposing views and data, as their careers and book sales rely on such tactics.
This is the MO of the Materialist Inquisition, and it happens more often than most people would believe. If you look into a lot of the decisions of the scientific establishment on some of the purported "psuedo-science" topics, you will see a very common theme: of ideology over-influencing what should be rational, unbiased discussion and evaluation of unorthodox ideas. Debate focuses on red-herrings, vast swaths of data and metanalysis are ignored, talking points are misconstrued, and the cop out of "we need more research" is thrown about with abandon, even in the face of insurmountable, clear evidence. For many, "Established Science" is assumed to be the case, and no investigation is put forth to validate or skeptically assess the neutrality of the history of such decisions on the truth of such "psuedoscience" topics. And as a further barrier for the general public finding out about these dubious methods, these things often take quite a bit of digging on the internet, journals, and books to get to the bottom of, as such decisions are almost never discussed after the fact by mainstream scientists who consider them true, prima facie.
A book I would highly recommend to peer deeper into the rabbit hole of proof that there is more to this reality than the materialist paradigm would admit is The Conscious Universe by Dean Radin. Be aware, this book is heavily laden with statistics, graphs, and scientific jargon. It's not exactly for the average reader, but it is definitely worthwhile for scientifically-oriented people who want to skeptically assess the assumptions and beliefs that mainstream science has erected.
As a final note, I would like to point out a piece of currently-developing news/research. One of the points of contention over Sheldrake's talk was his claim that the speed of light has changed several times over the last century. TED and materialist-inquisition bloggers cried foul, that this was not factual, citing limited date ranges, and claiming that such an idea has no theoretical underpinning and probably never will. Not only is it true that there was a period in the mid-twentieth century in which the speed of light changed and was replicated by numerous labs around the world, but according to these two upcoming papers, there IS a theoretical underpinning. At face value, it makes total sense, that the rate and number of virtual particles flitting into and out of existence would affect the speed of light. Perhaps this is the beginning of the shift into a new paradigm of physics? Perhaps even a means of merging Quantum Physics (which encompasses virtual particles in its mathematical framework) and Relativity (whose equations rely heavily on C, the speed of light) into the long-elusive theory of Quantum Gravity? Perhaps the curvature of spacetime is directly related to the density and polarization of virtual particles in a given area of space? I'm not a physicist, but I do like to speculate :D
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