Life After Death - Paranormal: "We all should be reasonably open-minded skeptics and for psychic phenomena indicative of life after death, only accept the theory that there is survival of consciousness after physical death when theories along normal lines and/or ESP (psi) fail to account for all of the evidence.

∙ There is no doubt that in a relatively short period of time, science has made great strides in understanding the physical world. Because of this, many people believe that if presently there is not a scientific explanation for something, it is not a question of if it will be explained by science but a matter of when. Applying this to the various paranormal phenomena, these people believe science will either have a complete explanation in the future or it is just a deception of some sort. Generally speaking, there is strong evidence for some of the psychic phenomena but not to the point where it can be accepted as fact.

The extreme skeptics of the paranormal have a tendency to refute the least credible of paranormal examples; they seldom try to take on the best evidence and if they do they do not give very credible alternative explanations. To do the former, is easy, the latter, near impossible. They also unfairly (and unscientifically I might add) tend to group all of the paranormal together and reject it all. Its not all or nothing and the same applies to"the various evidence types for life after death. For instance, mediums communicating with the dead could be true but this has no relation with astrology being true or not - the two are independent of one another but this gets lost on some of the extreme skeptics in their overall outlook.
In fact, with the paranormal as it relates to life after death, there clearly are many cases of both deliberate deception (as we would expect due to the nature of the subject) and where there are alternative explanations. But these are not the cases we need to be scrutinizing to determine if they constitute evidence for life after death - although this is unfortunately what some skeptics do to present their conclusions against the paranormal. The cases that have no other plausible conventional explanation are the ones that need to be held to the test.
We also have to be careful with paranormal phenomena in that, even if the particular phenomena or, more commonly the case, elements of it can be induced, it does not necessarily mean or follow that this is the cause of the paranormal phenomena and the explanation for it. A non-paranormal analogy being, for example, certain drugs can induce euphoria in a person but when one normally is experiencing euphoria, it is real and occurs naturally without the effect of any drugs. Therefore, drug intake is not the explanation for euphoria normally experienced even though drugs can induce it.
It should be noted that the various aspects to the best paranormal phenomena cases have thus far been very difficult to account for collectively using natural scientific models.
"If we asked, what would it take for me to believe in ESP? Would it take a single experiment? How about 10 statistically significant experiments in which the guy picked the right playing card? That still wouldn't quite do it because there's no way to understand how this could possibly happen in the brain. We understand how neurons and brain centers work but we don't know how something would transmit through space out of your skull into somebody else's skull. So those guys need to come up with some mechanism to explain it."
So even if the best explanation is a paranormal one, ultra-skeptics will not accept it because they do not understand the underlying mechanism for it.
∙ Most psychic occurrences are spontaneous and therefore hard to test under laboratory conditions. Ultra-skeptical scientists start with the assumption that something which contravenes the laws of science (as they are currently understood), cannot occur. They are not open to the possibility of non-material mechanisms explaining the data. Their lack of belief is a form of belief in itself.
In science, a new scientific statement is only accepted if it either agrees with established scientific laws or replaces rival statements with superior evidence and theory. Psychic phenomena clearly don't fit the first and haven't succeeded so far in the second. Not to make excuses for it, but due to it's nature, what is needed is a new framework to examine the claims for the various psychic phenomena rather than the existing limiting experimental science we have. Of course, ultra-skeptical scientists would rather not do anything that might accommodate anything to do with the paranormal and would therefore reject any such suggestions.
The logic of scientific inquiry must always allow for the possibility that the existing scientific laws are incomplete or even wrong.
Science is what we always need to use as the basis to start with, and if it fails to explain the phenomena, only then should we go outside of mainstream science and look at the possibility of paranormal explanations.
∙ William James was interested in the possibility of psychic phenomena. He believed it is sufficient to find one indisputable example of psychic occurrence to demonstrate that violations of natural law as we understand it is possible. He summed it up with the well known quotation from his book: "In order to disprove the law that all crows are black, it is enough to find one white crow." Thus, psychic researchers are always trying to find a "white crow".
Much of the paranormal evidence types for survival of consciousness can be explained by normal means, some of it is not possible to determine, and some is very likely to be evidence for survival. It is as if, on the surface at least, one can interpret however one wants - almost as if it is supposed to be this way.

Amazing Messages from Beyond: "SOME OF THE most compelling anecdotal evidence for life after death comes in the form of messages from deceased loved ones. Sometimes these messages are relayed by full-blown apparitions, while other times they come as voices, unseen hands and even written notes. Messages from the “other side” are most often words of comfort for the living, that they are okay and are still watching out for us. In the most interesting cases, however, those who have passed on communicate messages that are not only highly personal, but are of particular significance, important – even life saving. Here are some of those stories."

Grandfather's Gift
April had always been very close to her great-grandfather, who was a highly-respected baker and decorator of wedding cakes. When he died, April was heart-broken. “I barely spoke or interacted with anybody,” she says. A few weeks later, she was awakened from a sound sleep. She noticed something out of the corner of her eye. “I turned to look at the hall leading to my room. There was my great-grandfather standing there with another being. My great-grandfather just looked at me, raised his hand and lowered it back to his side slowly while saying, ‘Everything will be okay. I'll always be with you.’” April was told to lie down and go back to sleep. But her great-grandfather left April with an incredible gift. “Ever since then, I have been able to decorate and make any type of dessert – exactly the way he did. Before that, I had never even tried to ice a cake.”
Mom's Voice
It was an otherwise ordinary night in August of 1975 when 18-year-old Kris was taking her clothes to the laundromat behind the restaurant where she worked. She put she clothes in the washer and headed back to the restaurant to help her boyfriend, who was a cook there, close up the place. While walking to the back entrance, Kris’s attention was grabbed be a nondescript gold-colored car, although she didn’t know why. “I even turned around to look at it a final time before entering the back of the kitchen area,” she remembers. Once inside, she started to walk to the front of the kitchen area, then decided against it and simply leaned against a door area where she could not be seen from the front, as she was not in uniform and could hear customers. Suddenly, it became quiet. “Thinking that the last of the evening patrons had left, I started to take a step when I heard my mom's voice, as though she were standing there say, ‘Kris, don't move!’” Fortunately, Kris listened. Then one of the waitresses came screaming to the back and grabbed the phone to call the police. The restaurant had just been robbed at gunpoint! “Had I walked into view of the doorway,” Kris says, “I would have seen my boyfriend lying face down on the floor, the waitress and the few customers on their knees – and I would have been directly behind the gunman, who was so nervous I probably would have been shot when I startled him.”
Brotherly Ties
One night in June, 1942, George D. had a conversation with his brother that he could not explain. His brother, you see, was not there. He was flying bombers out of Trinidad, on a mission to destroy German submarines. “He told me he was going on a long trip and would not return,” George says. “I asked if I could go with him and he said not for a long time.” When George told his mother and sister about this impossible conversation, they dismissed it as a dream. Several days later, George’s family received the official notification that his brother died in a plane crash on 7 June, 1942. “Many years later, I was wounded and delirious during WW2,” George says. “When admitted for medical care, I could only remember my brother's name, serial number and military organization identification. I am still waiting for my brother's permission to go on his long trip.”