Back to the cop analogy, is a police officer who goes around murdering and stealing really a police officer? Because if not, then it means there's certain vies and beliefs that one must neccessarily hold in order to meet the definition of a title and there are also some views that they must neccessarily not hold. A scientist that does not believe in the scientific method is not a scientist.
Well if you see it as your job to police this forum (as opposed to discuss your views), then you will soon be out!
Are you suggesting that we just allow anyone off the streets to consider themselves a scientist?Are you suggesting we do not debate claims and weigh evidence because "oh it might hurt someone's feeings?" Are you saying we should not hold people to account and have standards of what is considered scientific and what is not because people have all sorts of views?
My view is that over the last 80 years or so, science has deliberately distanced itself from many of the things we discuss here. Before that, some of our greatest scientists - Pauli, and Schrödinger, to name but two, took a keen interest in such matters. If they were alive now, they would be ostracised within science for such views, and yet there has been no great proof obtained in the intervening years that concepts such as consciousness free of the body are false.
Some issues are inevitably subjective. For example, you say you have had an OBE, but you could not prove that assertion to someone who didn't believe in such things - indeed some would attack you for making an unscientific claim!. I feel that someone like Jane Kent should be listened to for her experiences, and really the only way to evaluate her work would be to obtain some statistics on the proportion of people that she manages to help/cure. Listening respectfully to a podcast such as hers, does not imply total agreement, but it makes one aware of another strand of human experience that may or may not be valid.
Some people with mental problems get very little help from conventional medicine - that sounds as if it was the case for the first patient she discussed - and anyone who can make progress with such troubled patients has to be taken seriously.
The root problem here, is that science has a very shaky grasp of the nature of consciousness. Some would like to think of consciousness as a sort of computation performed with 'wetware' rather than hardware! One obvious problem with that idea is that there is zero reason to expect that a computer running some algorithm would actually have experiences (qualia) - though of course, it could be made to pretend to some extent - printf("Ouch - that hurt!\n") if you like!
Unfortunately, the idea that consciousness is confined to the brain, and is in effect some sort of computation, has become so ingrained, that all the evidence that indicates this is not so, gets ignored. For example, Dean Radin has performed a long series of experiments (replicated by others) that show that people become subconsciously aware of an upcoming shock for a period of about 2-3 seconds prior to the event. His experiments are run by computer, and he uses skin conductance to measure the state of arousal, and the computer uses a genuinely random number generator (i.e. one based on quantum randomness) to decide what to present to the subject
after the excess arousal has been measured! The effect is known as presentiment.
Part of this forum is devoted to the shortcomings of modern science - as for example, in Alex's book. We discuss science a lot here, but we sure as hell don't worship it uncritically!
David