Master satirist DarkMatter2525 has created a wonderful short film contrasting buying a house and choosing a religion:
The technique is similar to a common strategy used in math and physics. When a problem is too difficult to tackle directly (like this example of trying to evaluate claims about gods and the afterlife) it's useful to begin with a much simpler problem; epistemologically get your feet wet. Most will remember studying motion in high school physics. First you study examples of motion with no acceleration, then motion with acceleration. Or without friction then with friction.
When it comes to questions about god and the afterlife, these are extremely difficult questions which cut across nearly every human discipline including physics, biology, logic, ethics, even history; which makes most of us pathetically under qualified to even approach them, yet we're forced to try anyway. So whatever methodology you choose to adopt, you should give it a test drive in a much simpler environment to make sure it produces acceptable results.
DarkMatter2525 chose to transpose the methodology to real estate (and at this point you need to watch the video if you have not already). My preferred example is rainbow unicorns. When you're presented with an argument dealing with an extraordinary claim (it could be having to do with religious miracles, aliens, bigfoot, crystal healing, alternative medicine) try to imagine how that would play out if the topic were rainbow unicorns.
I'm not claiming that if God exists, rainbow unicorns must exist or that god must be a rainbow unicorn. But it's a productive intellectual exercise to run through the thought experiment and contemplate what forms of evidence, if they did appear on your doorstep tomorrow, you would find convincing or laughable.
So many of the arguments for God, when framed in unicorn terms, instantly lose their power. The popular "but you can't prove that there is no god, so how can you be so sure?" intuitively carries some weight. You'd be tempted to hem and haw and concede that maybe you're not as certain as you were a moment ago. But if you move it over, "but you can't prove that there are no rainbow unicorns, so how can you be so sure?" is equally true, but makes it obvious that the argument is fallacious and was really just a piece of rhetoric used for emotional appeal rather than any kind of rational value.
Another favourite example is Darth Vader. Since even if he existed, he existed in a galaxy far far away, so the evidence of his existence would be unavailable to us here for empirical analysis. So investigating the existence of Sith lords is a bit of a stepping stone towards being comfortable tackling the big theological questions.
