Is all this stuff real? or not? The skeptic vs believer within ourselves

I wonder if part of this isn't just reflective of the conditioning we've had all our lives in our current culture ...

I was thinking alongh the same lines.

I have tried to talk about these subjects with friends and family and I am often up against a wall of indifference. It seems to me that we are conditioned, from an early age, to avoid talking about death, spirituality or the possibility of an afterlife. Part of this is due to the materialist bias inherent in the education system but a lot has to do with materialism of the other sort - the focus on accumulating enough material wealth in order to live a comfortable life and provide for our families.

Religious people, quite surprisingly, are also reluctant to talk about spiritual matters. They seem to concentrate on how Jesus (or God or whatever they worship) can help them live in peace and comfort while finding reasons to judge others who don't share their beliefs. I can't seem to determine a consistent religious approach to death and the afterlife.

Lastly, we who do dwell on these subjects often have a nagging doubt back there that maybe we are the irrational fringe and that the materialistic consensus has us categorised correctly. The skeptics probably do not have the opposite nagging doubts because they feel secure in belonging to the consensus view. I also have to remind myself, over and over, that the evidence we discuss here is solid and rational and that the skeptical attempts to dismiss it all is, by far, the more unlikely to be true. Skeptics are actually the fringe; most of the unconvinced are those I described above: the indifferent.