I'll go around it one more time. My point is simply that you cannot trust your memory and perceptions to give you the truth of things without elaborate safeguards against fraud, coincidence, wishful thinking, self-deception, and all the other errors human intelligence is prey to. This is well known to all serious students of human memory and perception, as all those links to The Skeptic's Dictionary I provided, and the further references they contain, make clear. Those safeguards are what the methods of science are about, and so far they've proven to be the only reliable means we have of determining the truth content of ideas. There is no anecdote in here, and there will not be one, that does not admit of much more prosaic explanations than the extraordinary interpretations of divinity and spiritual power many of you people have put on them.
For those who claim not to need evidence: what possible basis do you have for thinking you're right? It's not that my experience is significantly different from anyone else's, I simply interpret things differently. Many of you have made what I would consider to be self-serving emotional interpretations of events that suit what you want to believe or what you've been told by authority figures in your lives. It is lamentably easy to trick yourself into believing what you want to believe. Of course I'd like to believe my mother is still around in some form keeping an eye on me; who wouldn't? I loved her very much and it's a deeply comforting thought, that she's still around, that we'll be reunited some day... But I know of no reason to think that's true beyond my wish that it be so, and that's grounds to be extremely suspicious of it.
A very bright guy, an anthropologist named James Lett, once put it this way: “Because human beings are often motivated to rationalize and to lie to themselves, because they are sometimes motivated to lie to others, because they can make mistakes, and because perception and memory are problematic, we must demand that the evidence for any factual claim be evaluated without self-deception, that it be carefully screened for error, fraud, and appropriateness, and that it be substantial and unequivocal." I don't offhand recall where that came from, I have it in a letter I wrote to somebody else, but I'm sure I could find the citation on the Web if anybody's interested. Those are my--and science's-- standards of evidence.
