Video: Islam and the Future of Tolerance

Is Islam a religion of peace or war? Is it amenable to reform? Why do so many Muslims seem drawn to extremism?***On September 10, 2001, Sam Harris was studying neuroscience in California, and Maajid Nawaz was in Egypt working as a top recruiter for one of the biggest Islamist organisations in the world. The next day sent them down paths that would converge 15 years later in an unlikely collaboration.Harris entered life as a public intellectual after 9/11 and soon found himself regarded as a leading voice of the “New Atheist” movement, along with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett. He spent much of the next decade writing books such as The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, and The Moral Landscape and publicly engaging religious scholars and apologists in highly contentious conversations.  Meanwhile, Nawaz was arrested and thrown into an Egyptian prison, where he spent four years before beginning his slow journey out of radical Islamism. By the time he emerged, he had decided to dedicate his life’s work to reforming Islam from within. He started Quilliam, a counter-extremism organisation.  Islam and the Future of Tolerance tells the story of an unlikely conversation on a topic of grave importance, and how it changed two foes into friends.Link: Islam and the Future of Tolerance

A Ball and Feather Dropped in a Vacumn Chamber

Physicist Brian Cox visited NASA's Space Power Facility in Ohio to observe two objects -- a bowling ball and a feather -- dropped in vacumn chamber -- the world's biggest vacuum chamber to be exact:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E43-CfukEgs

Video: John Searle – Toward a Science of Consciousness

How can consciousness be addressed scientifically? The Tucson conference, founded in 1994 and celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2014, exemplifies the quest. What are the range of theories? Where do participants position themselves? Meet the founders, early visionaries, new scientists and thinkers. Progress is being made, but what does this really mean? 

Jacoby: Harvesting The Organs of China’s Prisoner’s of Conscience

Writes Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe:

The documentary, “Human Harvest,” won the coveted Peabody Award for its exposé of an unspeakable crime against humanity. In 1999, Chinese hospitals began performing more than 10,000 organ transplants annually, generating a vast and lucrative traffic in “transplant tourists,” who flocked to China on the assurance that they could obtain lifesaving organs without having to languish on a waiting list. China had no voluntary organ-donation system to speak of, yet suddenly it was providing tens of thousands of freshly harvested organs to patients with ready cash or high-placed connections. How was that possible?The evidence, assembled by human-rights researchers and investigative journalists, added up to something unimaginable: China was killing enormous numbers of imprisoned men and women by strapping them down to operating tables, still conscious, and forcibly extracting their organs — and then delivering those organs to the hospital transplant centers that have become a major source of revenue. Chinese officials claim that organs come from violent criminals on death row. But “Human Harvest” makes it clear that most of those killed are peaceful citizens persecuted for their beliefs: Tibetans, Uighurs, Christians — and, above all, practitioners of Falun Gong, a Buddhist-style spiritual movement of peaceful meditation and ethical commitment.

Read the rest of In China, prisoners of conscience are literally being butchered.See the movie trailer here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EykFRYWl9Q  

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