Hi Chris,

Your experience of your father and family was absolutely an after-death communication with your father. The primary mark is the fact that you felt it was real. We know the reality of those contacts. They're different from ordinary dreams, and have a real feel to them. That's proof they're real contacts. As to whether your dreaming imagination could make up such a scene, how many such dreams have you had of living people or celebrities or others on Earth whose contact you crave? And in what dreams of living people have you had rich, warm feelings of love and the conviction that the dream was a real encounter? Of course, you've had none. That's not what happens in dreams. People do have dreams, sometimes with living people, but the dreams are obviously fantasy and most often bizarre.

More importantly, you don't regard other dreams as real contacts with the real person. When you have a loving encounter with your deceased loved ones that just feels real, more real than ordinary dreams, then don't doubt it; it passes all the tests and is absolutely a contact with your deceased loved one.

You asked,
Is the Bible and all religion is merely a man-made concept to put at ease our earthly minds? As science progresses, it appears the Spirit World concept will ultimately become more obvious, and religions less necessary. What are we to do with the God theory and its teachings? What can we then expect this God to be?

Chris, understand that today's religions grew out of ancient traditions. Some other belief systems came later, but they were based on the ancient traditions, so those beliefs also are ancient in content. The God of the Jews from the eighth century BCE when the first texts of the Old Testament were written through the first century CE when Yeshua ben Yosef (Jesus) taught and his words were recorded, was Yahweh, mistranslated Jehovah. That was a partisan tribal God who sat on a throne in the sky. Yeshua was envisioned as sitting at the right hand of God on a throne. That was the way they conceived of God then: a big male that lived in the sky.

Ptolemy, in the second century, described the canopy of the heavens as made of eight concentric crystal spheres with the heavenly bodies rotating on them. The Earth was the center of the universe. The tiny lights in the sky were holes through the canopy and the light was God's realm on the other side of the canopy showing through. The religions today are based in those views of God as a big male in the sky and the universe as a canopy with Earth at its center. God was angry and vengeful and full of the most undesirable of human traits as well as positive sentiments.

As a result, when we speak of the nature of God, this primitive view from the monotheistic religions is what comes to mind. Religions sequestered spirituality and kept communication with God or differing conceptions of God from the common people. The image of God was frozen in time, and when people speak of God today, they have a view that is largely from those primitive tribal beliefs that held that God was a male living on the other side of the canopy of the heavens. If spirituality and God had been allowed to live in the minds of ordinary people, it would have changed it to fit their times; it would have evolved just as our view of the cosmos has evolved.

We learned from Copernicus and Galileo in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the Earth is not the center of the universe. We learned from Newton in the eighteenth century that gravity held the orbs in place in the cosmos, not crystal spheres. We learned from Edwin Hubble in 1929 that the universe is expanding, at 1.8 times the speed of light, and many of the lights we see in the sky are other galaxies filled with billions of stars. We learned remarkable things as humankind matured intellectually and grew in understanding of the cosmos. But the church kept the spiritual realm sequestered so humankind couldn't grow in spiritual understanding as it did in scientific knowledge. Today, spirituality is still caught up in religion that has primitive conceptions of humankind and God that came from the first century CE; it never matured out of the ancient tribal traditions.

And so, when you speak of science discovering God, science won't discover the God of the canonical texts of the Bible. That was a mythology that was believed by the primitive people who saw the heavens as a canopy of eight crystal spheres. But science is discovering the Higher Power or Ground of All Being that we know God to be today. Will science discover the old tribal God? No. That was mythology. Will science discover evidence for a First Cause, the Ground of All Being, the Higher Power? That's already happened. We now know that the mind is fundamental. Matter and energy emerge from consciousness, meaning they are emerging from the mind of God. The more we learn that the universe is not an accident and it is continually being renewed and reborn, the more we know that the source of that rebirth is the Higher Power. We are discovering God.

Humankind's conception of God is actually lagging behind science's discoveries about consciousness and the Higher Power. Science is learning about the real God while humankind is still struggling to cast off the primitive anachronism of believing God is a big male living in the sky.

The God we're learning about is pervasive, and one with our own minds. We collectively create reality on the Earth and in the next planes of life. In the power of that creation and the ability to make things like birds and planets and time, we are participants and partners, but behind it, unifying and creating all of it, is God. We're growing in our understanding of who God is, and as we do, we're learning that God is apparent, imminent, and benevolent. So science is discovering God as we each are just beginning to understand the real God that is beyond the mythological conceptions. And those discoveries by science and us as individuals are accelerating.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries discovered the Newtonian universe. The twentieth century discovered the quantum universe. The twenty-first century is discovering the spiritual universe.

Love and peace, Craig