For me it really helped defining the stakes. Not so much do I believe there's a possibility there's a God, so much as, do I believe that possibility is great enough that I should base any other decisions on it, that it should have any bearing on my life.

To say there's no possibility, well that's a gnostic standpoint, and I'll leave that to the theists. I don't think we're quite there yet, nor that we'll necessarily ever be. However, I think the possibility of God, and especially the many baseless guesses and assertions about the nature of the idea, is too small to justify pretty much anything. You can't say there's not a possibility, and for some it is a very charming idea, that there is some creator who created all of this with us as a, however small we may be, part of his plan. However, how much are you willing to pay for the stock you have to put in it? One hour of every sunday for fifty years is two thousand six hundred hours. That's over a hundred books, or over a thousand movies, or two thousand conversations. It's a fourth of the way to becoming an expert at something. It's a big price, and it's likely not the only one. There's all the stuff that doesn't only happen on Sundays, like opinions and ethics.

As far as I've been able to surmise, to allow for even a deistic God, requires you to water the concept out so thinly that it is hardly recognizable from the powerful semantics of the words we use to describe it. Not watering it down, requires you to rationalize that God is actively out to fool you, because the universe behaves exactly as it ought to if it were godless. Either that, or to consciously deny evidence in favor of faith, which is just silly. There's no measurable distinction between revelation and delusion. Any idea of God that does not instantly contradict known facts, has to be diluted into complete pointlessness, until it's really just a shorter way of spelling cosmos.

As for life persisting after death, why would it? There's no apparent vehicle, no place that we've ever observed where it could go. It's not impossible, but it's not likely either. Regardless, you shouldn't make it about feelings toward groups, or toward death, or any other thing. It's a matter of intellectual honesty. You shouldn't believe what you can't prove. Agnostic Atheism is a great stance, an open stance that will let you accept the answers if we find them, and until then, defend the position that you don't know and neither does anyone else.