I remember him trolling a usenet group I participated in years before signing up here. Holy fuck was he annoying. I was ever so happy to see that he’s a member here as well. Ugh.
Regardless of what you think about him, you gotta give him some credit for turning his NDE claims into such a longstanding and consistent posting personality on the internet.
If this is what I think it is - a solipsist statement, and Lekatt truly believes this, it negates everything else he could possibly say about anything.
-You can’t claim the universe is different for everyone, then go on to say anything concrete about anything.
Well, spirit isn’t a scientific exercise either. I don’t think the claim that people believe in spiritual things because it makes them feel good holds up. As one class of counterexamples, I would offer the anxiety that surely must accompany a sojourn through a pit of lions. Another would be the dread surrounding a fire progressing toward one’s feet. In fact, for many faiths, suffering — the very opposite of feeling good — is the spiritual ideal. People impoverish themselves, or even beat themselves with whips. People believe in spiritual things because they experience spiritual things.
But that’s not what he meant. At least, it isn’t what I would mean in agreeing with what you quoted him saying. The result of the experiment might be the same, but the perception experienced by any two observers cannot possibly be the same owing to the nature of electromagnetism and the inability of two masses to occupy the same space at the same time. Even if you and I were to mash our heads together until our eyeballs bleed while we watch your experiment, our eyes are viewing from two different angles. Our experiences are therefore different. All he means (or all I mean) is that no two life experiences are ever the same. They cannot be.
I agree with this. But are spiritual experiences, however real to the individual, a product of the outside world, or of the mind alone? For the observer applying scientific principles, we can only conclude it is all in the head.
As long as they admit that the experience occurs solely in their brain, much the same way that one person finds a joke funny while another doesn’t, I have no problem with it. The fact that something is “spiritual” (sigh) doesn’t make it real in any universal sense of the word. It’s as real as me saying I "I love the song A Day In The Life. BFD. What goes on in one person’s imagination is irrelevant to the rest of the world, except in the sense that their conveyance of their images may or may not be entertaining to others.
Why would it? He pays, he plays, just like the rest of us. It seems to me maybe he has seen something that many have not. I haven’t. I have seen shit that all the science and facts and book learning can’t explain. If you don’t like him why not just say so? I’m sure he won’t cry himself to sleep over it. I will say that I’ve only seen his postings of a religious nature so maybe I’m not as qualified as yourself to judge him.
I guess the question is, when you see things that science and book learning can’t explain, do you slap a supernatural overlay on it or do you say, “Wow…that was weird! I have no idea what I just saw!” Most of us have experienced things that we have no current scientific reference point for. That doesn’t mean it came from The Land Beyond…it simply means we don’t understand it. Though in LeKatt’s case, he’s heard numerous logical explanations for what he experienced and he refuses to accept any of them as viable possibilities.
I’ve experienced things that we have no current scientific reference point for. I’ve seen message posts in flames off the shoulders of the Straight Dope.