My opinion therefore becomes: An atheist cannot get any benefit from their religion because if they are right they are dead with everyone else. I don't know how else to put it. i don't want to offend anyone but that's as far as my understanding goes.
And so I go deeper into depth.
Your understanding could definitely stand to expand some. Okay, so first off, you think there's some god judging you that will determine your afterlife, right? That in itself is silly. It's completely unprecedented, and basically impossible to prove at all due to its very nature. Any argument based off this assumption is automatically in the realm of "there's pretty much no chance of any of this ever happening anyway."
But let's ignore that. Let's assume that you're definitely being judged. Sucks for you, because
you have no idea what you're being judged on. There's no reason to think any of the thousands of human religions have it right. Deciding that one of them will lead you to do the right stuff is a total shot in the dark; no matter what you pick, odds are, you're going to a bad, bad place.
And no, atheism isn't the "autofail" option here. That would assume that you're being judged on what gods you worship, but remember, you have no idea what the criteria are. Maybe an atheist could be rewarded in the afterlife for their intellectual honesty and search for truth in spite of its convenience or lack thereof. Maybe a theist of any sort would be punished simply for worshiping a false god, and the atheist spared for committing no such error. These are just examples; my point here is that, if you have no idea what you're being judged on, all bets are off and the atheist is no worse off than anyone else.
Again, that's all on the off off off off off
off chance that there's an afterlife and yours is determined by your actions in the here and now.