I believe that there is much that science has yet to explain and religion just doesn't explain it well.

I have experienced what I can only describe as communication over a distance with no contact on multiple occasions. As an example, many years ago I lost contact with a dear friend. During that time, she had several problems, including a pregnancy that resulted in miscarriage, and a bad breakup with her loser boyfriend. When we got back in touch with her, I already knew about the problems she had experienced, and could even tell her WHEN each of those events occurred. Again, there was no contact, and no discussions with mutual friends, either.

On another occasion, I was able to warn a friend of an impending car accident. We were wearing our seat belts, but the car was totalled two minutes later when, on a mostly abandoned back road someone pulled out in front of us.

As an Agnostic I don't believe or disbelieve in God, I have no need for religion. But, when it comes to human experience, individual experience, we all have our own sense of what's real or meaningful. Own yours, share yours. It reminds me of tribalism. It's all good. Thanks for sharing

The universe is so vast that it would be utter ignorance to rule anything out just because we don't know about it. Science has done a lot to dispel the mystery and awe of what was once unknown, but to many the aeons of superstition are still deeply ingrained into our DNA.

It's a careful tightrope walk that we have to master, for even Einstein knew without the power of our imaginations we have nothing to fuel the sails of our discoveries.

I want to believe, but I have to verify.

Mine was the Vietnam draft and the commitment of the US to kill for Capitalism under the delusion of the cold war. I was taught to follow the money of any business. And General Smedley Butler wrote- 'War is a Racket.'
While my dad was a wack Catholic and wanted me to be a priest, when I refused and he had power contacts in gov., I feared he might get me some how sent to Nam no matter what my # was. So my saving grace was to study philosophy, history, and theology, stumbling upon reason that didn't make me feel like a coward. And the powerful protest movement surrounding DC where I grew-up, helped me to see the hypocracy of war as a profit industry.

I fell in love with the power of mythology, the poerty of love contained within the gospels, minus the bible babble. It called me to life of purpose driven by the Enlightenment. How Jesus was spread by the Sword caused me to doubt all organized religion. And history revealed the ugly truths of war as call to kill for corporate profits. Add to that, the burbs of DC were a paradise of sex, drugs, and music. Being forced into a seminary as a high school student where they forced you to sign a pledge of celibacy, was something I refused to do. And eventually got me kick-out.

Add to that a few years later, Father Current, a Jesuit teacher at CU was challenging church doctrine of birth control. They eventually crushed him. Removed him from his teaching position, but introduced another voice of decent to church power. The burbs of DC were great.

I might say maybe it just a matter of stress where you start to see unusual things

Things happen that we cannot explain. I am comfortable with that. I don't need to make up a story (one that features a divine man, for example) to assign meaning to an inexplicable event.

I do think minds can connect across distances. The night my grandfather died - in a state 1000 miles away - he appeared to me in a dream. At the time I was having trouble in a job search, and he said he'd been struggling, too. I'm ashamed to say I wasn't thinking much about him in my waking hours, so to learn the next morning that he had passed on was jarring.

I often have nightmares about the Holocaust. Feels like I lived and died then. Don't believe in reincarnation so shit happens.

Nothing challenges my Atheism.
Because there is nothing to challenge it.

Any experiences you have had are relevent to that particular time. We have all had them. Within themselves they are not proof of anything tangible as in an afterlife, but are needed by you and ment to help you along in some way. A friend of mine had a nephew that died of a brain tumor. Both men were very close. For a long time my friend could not sleep at night laying there worrying about his nephew. One night (he told me this story) his nephew appeared at the foot of his bed and told him he was alright. He didn't have to worry about him anymore. This encounter made everything OK again and my friend could sleep normally.
We are all connected.

Some experiences are not explainable, most are. The preponderance of evidence is against the supernatural (or apparent supernatural). It seems logical that there will always be a handful of odd, inexplicable events, but I have learned to just admit that I can't explain them without making up explanations or developing life-changes beliefs surrounding them. I don't think that's warranted.

My stepson is an unbeliever in deities also, but has always had a fondness for "ghost hunter" type shows. The only explanation he can give me is that he enjoys them as entertainment, as a way to feel less irrational fear of the dark, which he's had since childhood and has never really shaken (he's in his mid-20s). After his high-school graduation, we surprised him with a graduation gift wherein we went on a real-life ghost hunt in a rural midwestern town where one of several "professional" ghost hunting operations is based.

As per the usual routine we stayed up all night in a creepy old historical building doing various parlor tricks while the video cameras rolled (and no, to my knowledge this never actually made it on TV, although this outfit does occasionally sell footage to such shows). One of these was for a person to hold a couple of divining rod-like things, basically L-shaped metal rods with rotating wooden handles on them. Imagine holding these handles with the rods perpendicular to your body. If you hold them VERY still they don't move. If you so much as breathe, they move, and usually in an uncoordinated fashion. I tried this myself. They're very delicately balanced.

My wife ended up with them and the idea is you ask various (preferably yes/no) questions and the rods will then point to something appropriate. For example, where in the room is Sally? And the rods will hopefully point to Sally. Or, the rods will point to an alphabet on paper and spell out simple messages. While my wife held these (but, significantly, not while I did) these rods were pointing in perfect unison to totally logical things in response to questions, and spun out a story of some particular deceased person who had died in a snowstorm in that area over a hundred years ago.

My wife swears up and down that she had no conscious role in this, but this sort of thing is well-understood as "the ideomotor effect", an unconscious muscle movement in response to your own thoughts, which, in this sort of environment are being very much led by the facilitator. I would think that unconscious motor responses should have difficulty controlling the movements of the two rods, given how hard it is to do deliberately. But ... that's how the effect is said to work. I find this the best provisional explanation for what happened.

(We returned to the same place a couple of years later without our son, but could not reproduce the interesting events of our first visit and in fact the whole evening was pretty much a total bore and a complete bust).

We left after that first night asking ourselves WTF did we just experience. Psychic aliens from Beta Antares IV playing around with us? Mass hysteria? Actual ghosts?

I did notice something about that night though, there was an eclectic mix of Christians, spiritualists, Buddhists and the areligious that night, and whatever each person experienced that had some "paranormal" feel to it, they tended to interpret it reflexively in terms of their particular belief system.

In the end, I just said, I'm not sure what that was and I'm willing to wait until I have better information. Until then, the most likely explanation is the ideomotor effect, the same thing that drives an Ouija Board experience. Recently I read that there's actually a sensor that's been developed that sits on your jaw, and leverages a combination of the ideomotor effect and brainwave analysis such that you can think about some phrase or statement in your head and the device will write it out with 87% accuracy. In part, because you are unconsciously flexing your jaw muscles as you think about the phrase. You're very subtly, silently mouthing what you're thinking. You can't help but do it.

If we had succumbed to the operant conditioning that this ghost hunting experience set us up for, we might be "questioning our agnosticism" or some part of it, I suppose. But this is a single, and highly "ginned up" experience, with the right people present and feeding off each other, and the right atmosphere, and I can't imaging using it as a rationale for deciding that the supernatural exists.

The supernatural, when asserted, is always appealing to stuff that's in the corner of your eye like this, so to speak. It never just presents itself for examination on demand, you have to be in a particular receptive emotional state. That should tell you something right there.

So sure ... when my late 2nd wife died, the next day I was in the car, and the radio played our favorite song, the one that had been played at our wedding 13 year earlier (Bette Midler's The Rose, if anyone cares to know). Was this a message of comfort from my wife? Or is it more likely what was on the play list that day, and I was more likely to take note of it because of the emotionally upsetting events going on at that time? I should think, the latter. But there are a lot of people who would say it was the former. I just don't buy it.

As much as we do know about the universe it probably isn't very much. Just because l don't believe in God doesn't mean l totally discount other types of existence.

So sorry about your mom. I have had experiences similar to yours; I don't know how to explain them. If there's one thing I've learned in my lifetime, it's that anything is possible.