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.
Could you expand on how they fail in their expectations? I'm not sure what exactly it is you're referring to.
To use the example of Spiritualism the entire claim revolved around the ability to talk to the dead and for the dead to easily manifest themselves through mediums. That fails miserably (hence the very long history of mediums being caught engaging in fraudulent behavior often involving cheap magic tricks.) But, just as with God, the solution has been to move to less and less testable hypotheses, so that instead of forming actual entities that spe...
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.