Is a historian or an archaeologist a medium? They certainly speak for the dead.
I've no trouble with the idea of ghosts and spirits in a general sort of way, since they fall into my mental category of "unexplained phenomena that an awful lot of people seem to experience", a varied and interesting category towards which I favor an attitude of healthy agnosticism. That said, I do not tend to believe people who say that spirits speak to them in full sentences, as the sentences in question always seem to be very indicative of the biases of the speaker. People who believe in New Age spirituality tend to claim the authority of the dead for New Age ideas; people who believe in ecclectic Christianity ferry back messages, sometimes entire books, from heaven or hell. Atheists come up with sometimes fantastically complex and implausible "scientific explanations" for any contact with ghosts and spirits they might have had. Vodouisants carry messages with the Lwa as additional mediators. Mediums of all stripes give messages in their own languages, never those of the dead they are channeling. If the dead are attempting to deliver pure messages for us, untainted by the bias of the medium themselves, they are clearly enough not succeeding in doing so. Perhaps this is all for the good, and the powers that be, whether for their own reasons or for our sakes, do not trust the living with that kind of knowlege.
