Most religions have a component of some afterlife experience of an individual, with possible desirable or undesirable experience based on what is done in current life. There are differences in the exact nature of the afterlife experience, but the pleasant and unpleasant component is a common thread in almost every religion.
There is not much that can be done to verify these claims, and it is more a matter belief. Each individual needs to decide for self whether to believe in it or not. It is matter of weighing the word of a prophet or a saint against the word of a contemporary individual, whom do you want to trust, whom do you see as telling the truth. For a believer the choice is obvious. There have been claims whether the prophet or saint ever existed, whether the words are really their own, whether we understand what they said, and finally whether they really were whom we believe them to be. Each person needs to decide for self on these points, and it is no small task considering the validity of words printed in newspapers today are hard to verify, especially political matters, and how much more the difficulty to verify words that were spoken or written many years ago.
But I believe pushing self to make a decision on this matter is worth it. If it is evidence of an afterlife that you are waiting for, it is unlikely to come in our lifetime. Each of us have only a lifetime to decide and place our bet with a supposed everlasting consequence. Science will continue to find new facts for centuries to come, but none of us will be here beyond maybe the present century. So in this matter science can give no practical solution in a lifetime apart from perennial indecision or skepticism. One thing that is apparent in this world is that "Ignorance does not give immunity, nor does indecision". If a person does not know that a snake is poisonous and allows himself to be bitten, he will still die. In courts of nature, ignorance or indecision is not a defense. This does look life baseless fear-mongering, and maybe it is, or maybe it is not, we can only know after this life, when it is apparently too late to change our bets. To some this may not look fair. I don't know, but that is how this game of life, literally speaking, seems to have been set up. Limits of human understanding is a topic for another post.
One way to see this would be that there does seem to be at least two differences between a dead body and living body. First is life, the movement, the animation, something like an electricity or power switch going on and then off. Second is character, the behavioral part, all that makes a person a unique person different from other people, the 'I'-ness of an individual. Another thing we can observe in this world is that Nature wastes nothing, absolutely nothing at all (or, at least I have failed to find it). Everything is recycled in Nature. Rivers are ever-flowing not because there is infinite quantity of water, but because all water is recycled. Farms give ever-flowing crops season after season, not by manufacturing new stuff but recycling soil, water and nutrients. Earth seems to have endless birth of organisms and animals, by recycling the dead bodies. Going by the same principle, if there is stuff which represents 'I'-ness of an individual, the feeling of I and me, then that too will be recycled. This could be the thing which religion calls a soul. Each organism, or animals at least, seems to have a character of its own, an 'I'-ness component to it, and we can be sure Nature is not creating it anew for each organism but reusing it from a previous one.
Coming to the point, why do we not have evidence of an afterlife, why has no one returned to tell us of a tale. How will the organism prove that it has indeed returned, without being treated as a freak or a liar, and how can the claims be verified. What if the memory is being reset so no one remembers? This comes under the category of an assumption which may remain practically unprovable in an individual's lifetime, and lies beyond the reach of science as there are no methods to objectively measure and verify it.We need to remember that an assumption may not be wrong just because it cannot be proved, but that does not mean that every unprovable assumption is true.
Coming to which religion is telling the truth, here again each individual needs to decide for self. Only thing I would say is, that a hand-written map may not be drawn to scale, may not be completely accurate, but as long as it does not make major mistakes in few key points, it can still allow the traveler to reach the destination (on the other hand, if the traveler is unable to discern the possible inaccuracy, it can cause delay and inconvenience).
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