That's what all the evidence shows. In that sense I'm being more scientific than those who just dogmatically deny the existence of paranormal phenomenon to support their own physicalist ontology. That's what you do isn't it?
Do you accept the existence of paranormal religious phenomena? Miracles, religious experiences and whatever? There's certainly no end of reports of them, from many different cultures and traditions, throughout history.
If you do accept that stuff, then isn't it evidence for the truth and reality of what you started this thread to bash?
If you don't accept the existence of paranormal religious phenomena, then how do you distinguish the sort of paranormal phenomena that you do favor from the religious examples? How are the religious and non-religious examples different? Why do you believe that the non-religious examples are more credible?
Everybody in the world knows what religion refers to except apparently you and Jan.
The first topic that most philosophy of religion classes address is the definition of the word 'religion'. And fact is, there isn't any universally accepted definition. Many definitions have been proposed, of several different sorts, and all of them fall prey to objections.
Probably the best approach (in my opinion at least) is to treat religion as a 'family resemblance' concept. In other words, there might not be any single essence of religion, some set of defining characteristics that all religions possess and no non-religions do.
What seems to have happened in history (at least in early modern times in the English language) is that 'religion' was first applied to the three 'Abrahamic' religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Then after the voyages of discovery, Europeans came into contact with a host of things in foreign lands that shared many, but not all, of the characteristics of these three paradigmatic (to Europeans) religions. Buddhists had monks and temples and scriptures. But confoundingly, they didn't have any central God or any idea of sin and redemption. The Confucians were another problem case. The so-called 'tribal religions' presented others.
So 'religion' came to mean pretty much anything that resembled Christianity (and Judaism and Islam) enough to be recognizably the same kind of phenomenon, without any expectation that there's any one single defining characteristic that all religions must all share in common.
But then that's the typical apologetic strategy isn't it? Redefine religion into something so general and nonspecific that every horrible instantiation of it can be dismissed as an exception to the rule.
If the question of whether or not something is a religion is a matter of family resemblance, and if the boundaries of what is and isn't a religion is notoriously vague and poorly delineated, then questions do arise.
It seems to me that a belief system that emphasizes the promise of personal survival of death, affirms the reality of spiritual beings, and holds that a spiritual realm of being exists that's more true, real and fundamental than this physical space-time-matter universe, does share many characteristics in common with more conventional religious doctrines. In particular, it seems to me that the motivations for believing in such a vision are probably much the same.