“In the early 80’s things started to come apart. The Oil Industry Bust, Desktop Publishing and a general downturn in business made profitability impossible. Tried to hang on to my business for a while believing things would get better. They got worse. This period of working longer hours for less money caused a deterioration of health and in 1987 I was diagnosed as having severe heart disease.”
“The Heart Specialist recommended surgery with a warning that I might live only 6 more months without it. But, I opted to wait and see if it would improve with a program of diet, and mild exercise. After about two months of trying this cure with minimal results I had an experience that changed my life forever.”
I actually had a heart attack on Jan. 1, 1987. As I said above the doctor told me I wouldn’t live six months without surgery. I didn’t have sufficient insurance, very tight with money. So I said no. Not wanting to burden my family with bills if I died.
I was going regularly to the doctor at the time of my NDE.
Perhaps you didn’t know this, didn’t read my site, or just didn’t ask. I don’t know.
If you want to continue the personal attacks, I can’t stop you, but I will write out a full detail of my heart condition, for those who care to know.
You will not run my off this board with your attacks.
You had a bad dream sometime after being told that you had a heart problem. Did I miss the part where you were in the hospital having an actual heart attack when this “NDE” happened? Did I accidentally skip over the passage where doctors heroically revived you immediately after you had the “NDE”? Am I the only one who mysteriously didn’t see the passage in you narrative where the doctors told you you had just had a heart attack?
No?
I didn’t think so.
BTW, thanks, but no thanks for the “forgiveness”.
Ummm… you want a scientific proof of the scientific method? Assuming this were possible, on what basis would you accept the proof unless you already accepted the method by which it was derived, in which case you would presumably already have seen the proof.
I have read that story(Though not for a while). You mention being in bed with your wife, going to sleep, and having the experience of being out of your body and conversing with a being of light. This being asks you ‘Do you wish to continue?’. I’m not even sure what this question means- Do you wish to stop this journey and go back to your body and continue your life? Or Do you wish to die and continue this journey with me? Eventually, you woke up. I saw no proof that you were actually near death- no record of a heart attack that night, no wife waking up to give you cpr or call 911. No stay in the hospital following a cardiac event.
I have read your site. But, it is all just a reminder of how badly you were maimed. Each reading hurt more and more. After the last visit, I began sobbing uncontrolably and spent three days on the floor in the fetal position. Having no wish to experience that kind of pain, or pay those kind of carpet cleaning bills, I haven’t visited since then.
No, because the questions were asked in response to your first post. They’ll remain on the list until you see fit to respond to them.
I knew you’d find some way to rationalize this obvious contradiction; I just wasn’t sure exactly how. As anyone who follows my provided links sees quite clearly, both threads were about the same thing and your answers were about the same thing.
The first was Mr. Blue Sky asking about Judgment Day in different religions. Your response: “According to near death experiences, yes, there will be a judgement.” The other was AcidKid asking, half-jokingly, about how to determine the time of Judgment Day, given that all religions have a different one. Your response: “I don’t believe there will ever be a judgement day.” At no time was the Christian concept of Judgment Day specifically singled out in either thread. This is a clear contradiction and invalidates your oft-repeated claim that you have infallible knowledge of the afterlife.
The updated list:
Stuff Lekatt Refuses To Respond To:
What reason is there to believe there is a “mind” separate from the body?
What evidence is there that “brain waves” come from outside the brain?
How can you and van Lommel find it justified to say that NDEs have no physiological cause when physiological factors such as age have been linked to NDEs?
Why do you selectively quote articles, such as the one quoting Dr Parnia, so that it seems like they agree with you?
What is your response to Dr Parnia’s critics, also quoted in the same article?
Where is the documentation of the Pam Reynolds surgery, according to you the best documented NDE, showing the correlation between Reynolds’s memories and reality?
Why isn’t it strange that brain researchers think the brain is incredibly complex, and you don’t?
If you truly do not care about scientific methods, as you have stated, why do you continue to drag scientific studies into the discussion, demand cites, and so on?
Please define “hardwired” for me - I’m not sure how you’re using the word.
The brain forms new neural connections. Is this what is meant by “hardwired”? It forms them throughout a lifetime, indeed Huntington’s Disease is directly attributable to neurogenesis. Do you disagree?
Very well, can you tell me the function of the hippocampus, amygdala and prefrontal cortex? Surely that’s as easy as telling me what the heart does?
A psychological factor is neither a medical factor nor a spiritual factor, agreed?
I agree with you. The spirit is an Ockhamly unnecessary entity.
I keep directing you to neurological research papers and you keep denying that they are evidence of correlation between experiential and physical entities. How could I convince you that the physical can be correlated with the experiential?
Let’s do this paper again, a PDF entitled “From molecules to Memory”. In this paper, a mouse was given a shock after a tone. No activity occurred in the cerebellum during the tone, until the shock itself. After having this done many times, the tonecaused activity in the cerebellum which was not there before.
“Learning” caused a measurable physical difference in the mouse’s brain. How can you disagree with this statement? How can you say that this is not evidence of a correlation?
We care not one jot about whether you had a profound and powerful experience - after all, I’ve had them myself. What concerns us is that you believe that this is evidence of an afterlife rather than simply a powerful DREAM. I believe my experiences were effectively DREAMS. That night, I believe you had a DREAM in which you were asked whether you wanted to continue living, not a heart attack which almost killed you. Being asked whether you want to continue living does not put you Near Death.
I’ll tackle this one if lekatt won’t. Both philosophy and physics suggest it, although, I’ll grant you that neither one proves it. Philosophically, if you start out assuming you don’t know anything, what do you notice? Well, there’s the laws of logic; they’re true. And then you have these perceptions. There seem to be two kinds of perceptions: one kind is more vivid than the other kind, and you don’t have as much direct control over the vivid ones, which seem to come from outside you, unlike the less vivid perceptions. So you give them names: the not-so-vivid-kind are your thoughts and feelings. Then you theorize that there’s a material world that exists outside of you causing these vivid perceptions. But perception, a mental event, came first. To turn around and say that the material world causes the mind is kind of like the tail wagging the dog.
Now physics: Quantum mechanics describes the world using wave functions, which express the probability of something being at a given place moving at given speed in a given direction. When you make a measurement, the wave function suddenly changes to a new one: you have more information now, so you can rule out any probability of certain locations, speeds, and/or directions; at least at the instant you made the measurement. This interaction, the collapse of the wave function, is different from another object interacting with the first one: that would involve a second wave function interacting with the first. This suggest that observation–the mind interacting with the physical world–may involve something non-physical.
I’m not sure I follow you. Are you saying that the material world doesn’t cause the perceptions?
I’m not a quantum physicist (but I’m sure one will be along shortly), but I do not agree with this at all. Observation is not something non-physical. It requires instruments that, given the incredibly smallness of the observed events, necessarily influence them. If you stick a thermometer into a bathtub, the thermometer will alter the water’s temperature ever so slightly. At that level, we won’t notice or care. At the quantum level, these influences are much, much greater. There is nothing non-physical about that.
No, I think you are misunderstanding the wavefunction collapse. There are different interpretations of quantum mechanics, but none of them necessitates an appeal to non-physical entities. This “mind’s interaction with the physical world” is no more mystical than finding out which room you are in by opening your eyes.
You have continuall ignored my cites and evidence of consciousness living after the death of the body. You keep pushing your cite which could mean anything. An experiment on a mouse. This difference does not “have” to be memory.
It seems the closer we get to truth the meaner the posts become. Personal attacks are always calls for help.
If you want to back off and focus on one question at a time, it will be better.
Otherwise I see this thread which started badly will end badly. I am not discouraged, just will spend my time with those who want to learn. http://www.alternativescience.com/no_brainer.htm
Love
As you ignore questions put to you, criticisms of your cites and evidence, and the question of why you care about cites or evidence at all when you’ve stated that you are not interested in scientific methods.
So what is it? Do you have a better explanation? If not, why should we accept your view over the view that has a good explanation?
You seem to be choosing your evidence very selectively. The mind can be nonphysical, and according to you it is. The changes in the mouse brain can be memory, but according to you it isn’t. How do you distinguish?
You have not shown anything which had to be explained like this. Everything you have shown could be explained by dreams and guesswork. Now, you choose your explanation and I’ll choose mine, but do not pretend that these citations are evidence for consciousness after death. They simply are not.
You agree that it correlates? If so, why propose a further entity to explain it? Yet again, I ask: How do you EXPLAIN the activity in the cerebellum?
I am asking you one question at a time. You are ignoring them. Why couldn’t your experience be a dream?
THIS IS A SPOOF WEBSITE. PLEASE tell me you are not calling this “evidence”.
SentientMeat, I’m sure you are better informed about Quantum Mechanics than I, but are you really saying that the act of observation does not influence the event?
In a manner of speaking, under some interpretations, it might be said to do so. But it is nothing so simple as, for example, the screen in the two slit experiment somehow ‘affecting’ the particles it detects.And, Lord help me, that website lekatt cited appears to be deadly serious.
Here’s a contradiction.
lekatt
Charter Member Join Date: Apr 2002
Posts: 1,522
Location:
Quote:
Originally Posted by trandallt
Exactly what would be the nature of evidence that God (or anything else for that matter) does not exist?
God is usually represented as higher intelligence, a director, one that brings order out of chaos. So in the absence of God you would find only chaos, random events without stability of any kind. Nothing could live in temperature swings of 1000 degrees coupled with random flooding and random foliage producing random supplies of oxygen, etc… The best argument for God still rests with intelligent design, unless of course, you have met God and talked with Him.
But back to the OP. we are not servants, we enjoy the status of children learning to be like our Father. I am sure there is much more to it than we can know.
Love
How can foliage produce oxygen in an environment where nothing could live?
Forgiveness actually heals the forgiver, who lets go of certain moral dead weight that serves only to fulfill a self-imposed punishment. So, I wouldn’t take someone’s offer of forgivenss to mean that I am in need of some sort of moral dispensation; rather, I would take it to mean that the person forgiving me has finally found some moral resolution within himself.