It depends on the nature of the afterlife. In that regard "afterlife" is like "God" in that there are so many different versions of what the term means that making the belief pay rent in any reasonable amount of time can be difficult. But if one looks at most traditional afterlife claims, then those which pay rent fail pretty miserably. at their expectations Take for example classical Spiritualism or Roman Catholicism as useful examples.
Could you expand on how they fail in their expectations? I'm not sure what exactly it is you're referring to.
Honestly, I would say that the idea of an afterlife is much harder to assail than one of God. Definitions of God that excuse it from providing evidence we don't observe tend to be incoherent, unsatisfying, or morally reprehensible, whereas it's not clear that the definitions that excuse an afterlife from providing evidence make it any less satisfying.
I was on Reddit today, and I came across (this link)[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/eyiat/for_those_of_you_who_have_died_and_been/]. One of the things I've seen on this site that's bothered me is the exclusion of personal experiences in deciding what a person should or should not believe. I know that less wrong is mostly atheist, and I wanted to hear less wrong's reaction to descriptions of experiences like these.
For example, my dad was in the hospital 5 or 6 years ago when a truck came across an icy road and hit him head-on. His most vivid memory from this is a dream he had when he was in the hospital. He was in a pool of water with my mom, and they were both naked (they were underwater, but didn't need to breathe). He remembers that at the end of this pool, there was a bright light that he wanted to head towards. He began to swim that way...and here, I don't remember what happened, but he was unable to reach the light for some reason.
Such stories seem to be common for people who come close to death, and for a community based around rationality which seems to consider the likelihood of life after death as slim, I just wondered what your reactions are. My reaction is that such experiences are explainable in terms of neural activity, but that doesn't necessarily exclude the possibility that these are descriptions of experiences of an afterlife. I'm not convinced by them, but I do consider it to be possible.