Let me attempt to respond to the latest posts.
To Meg, I noted in my second post that my brother did not meet directly with the alleged psychic, his girlfriend's mother, so the mother could not have abstracted any information from him. This fact I did not make clear in the original post. My apologies.
Since joller asked about my religious beliefs, let me elaborate on them. I am in a very nominal sense Christian, as follows. My parents went to a Unitarian church when I was growing up, but stopped going when I was in my very young teens. I don't know the extent of their beliefs. Unitarians are sometimes lampooned on 'The Simpsons' as something like Christian lite, and certainly their devotion to the Christian orthodoxy seems less strong than for other Christian sects like Roman Catholicism or some of the more fervent Portestant sects.
I have never been a churchgoer, but I do have some understanding of the Christian beliefs and enjoy the Christian holidays. Certainly I am not Jewish, or Islamic, or Hindu, or any of the other religions. I cannot say I believe in the essence of Christianity, namely the Holy Trinity and the divinity of Jesus Christ. (Odd time to be mentioning it, during Lent right now.) But I am in no position to deny it either - how could I do so definitively? As Martin Luther once said about faith, 'that whore, reason'.
My own belief tends to be atheistic. I cannot disprove the existence of (a) God any more than I can prove it. So I fall back to the position of agnostic, meaning I don't know. If my response seems ambiguous to readers here, it is because my own feelings are ambiguous. This information I have provided as context, given that the psychic claimed to be in communication with a Catholic saint, and one could argue that that fact influenced my recollection or recounting in some way.
About Occam's razor, the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (said to be the best-selling dictionary in America) 11th ed. defines it as follows: "a scientific and philosophic rule that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily which is interpreted as requiring that the simplest of competing theories be preferred to the more complex or that explanations of unknown phenomena be sought first in terms of known quantities".
Given this definition I think it should be obvious why I mentioned it. If we are trying to explain an unknown phenomenon, namely psychic ability, the preferred explanation should be the simpler one, one that requires only this world, not the existence of another world beyond. This is in fact what the skeptics are doing. Furthermore, I do not have a problem with it. I thought I had made it clear that I am not wedded to the notion that the story I told was conclusive proof of any psychic ability, only that it was an intriguing, unusual story, one that could, could, be an instance of it, especially given the context of her prior history as it was informally related to me.
I don't write anyone off as an idiot. I am inclined to think, however, that some people are too eager to dismiss it with just a little bit too much short-tempered self-righteousness for my taste. But that's their right, and they are free to do so.
I do accept the possibility that psychic ability does not exist. I am also willing to accept the possibility that it may. I prefer to remain open minded on the subject.
About the possibility that I may be a liar, Glite suggested it.
The point of my mentioning Alice's personal data, which I would have thought would be obvious enough, is for the benefit of those posters here who have been trying to obtain a reasonable statistical estimate of the probability that the name was a lucky hit based on demographic data, such as the distribution of the name Alice at different points in time and in different social groups.
Unfortunately, I am fairly certain the woman died a number of years ago, as she was herself not in very good health at the time my mother died. As such, she could not participate in any challenge. How fortunate, the skeptics say.
Well, when I die, we'll see what happens. If I survive in some fashion, this one will be on my list of question to be answered, including who shot JFK, and where is Jimmy Hoffa?
The thing here is though, that, if we take Neponset's two posts at face value, Alice F. was THE logical choice to send a message to his mother. Specifically, Neponset stated: "Of my mother's closest friends that I knew during the last 40 years of her life, Alice F was perhaps the closest. Two other close friends from childhood were still alive at the time."
