Ah forgot that one. I remember how even handed it was it didn't state explicitly she was in an afterlife but didn't say it was simply a delusion in her head either. I liked that.
I was reading through the thread and was going to say that. It would have been neat of while talking to her father, he mentioned the bad news of her mother passing away, then B'elanna could have contently replied "I know" as if she had already come to terms with it.
The concept of "science VS. religion" is largely a myth. There's no reason why they should be at odds - they're not inherently hostile to each other.
I didn't interpret Neelix's experiences and Mortal Coil as a whole, as being the final say that there is no hope of an afterlife. He had that realization of nothing after his not quite full death experience. He was expecting a pre-conceived version of the afterlife but in his Spirit Quest he then had a twisted version of the afterlife. I take the message of Mortal Coil as Neelix realising he had unfinished business, it wasn't about the afterlife it was about reclaiming his life. He needed to chase away his insecurities about being a redundant crew member, as he told Naomi at the end.. he chased away a monster.
But it wasn't clear if her mother had passed away in Barge of the Dead, at the end she says I'll see you in Stovokor and her mom then says or maybe when you get home. Of course then her father saying that her mother "would have liked that" when she said they were thinking of naming their daughter Miral implied to me that she had passed away.
I was bringing this up in the Orville vs. Discovery thread as one of my favorite Star Trek episodes as a theist. It's one of my favorite "Star Trek tackles religion" episodes and goes up there with most of DS9. Voyager also did a good job with this, "Sacred Ground", and "Barge of the Dead." I generally think this is one of the best Star Trek: Voyager episodes and one of the most respectful to the subject while also having a point I disagree with (believing in an afterlife). Basically, Neelix loses his faith and becomes an atheist. It's something that happens in real life all the time. He deals with it by choosing to live his life to the fullest and helping his loved ones anyway. It would be nice for him to have his religion still but the point of the episode was life was still worth living and he was still the same bumbling doofus we all knew--just sadder. Depends on the religion and the scientist. Some pantheists only revere materialist nature and don't believe in an afterlife while there's the Biocentrism guy who has discovered existentialist Buddhism. Or, in Star Trek terms, it's weird how the Vulcans are the most religious people in the galaxy. But yes, speaking as a man who grew up in the Bible Belt--there's nothing to fear from the truth as religion can only be improved by it. The only difference is what we revere and what form it will take.
As others have noted above, the episode is deliberately ambiguous about whether there is an afterlife or not. I believe that it is also deliberately ambiguous about whether Neelix continues to believe (or can continue to believe) in an afterlife or not. What he decides at the end of the episode is that his life has worth and purpose independent of his belief or disbelief in an afterlife. That position is antithetical to certain religious belief systems which teach that mortal life is something to be endured and/or transcended; that it has no value or that it has no value independent of an afterlife. But the position that life has value is not necessarily antithetical to belief in an afterlife, more generally. Calvin once asked Hobbes, "What if there's no afterlife. What if this life is all that we get?" to which Hobbes responded, "I'll take it, anyway."
He's not bad, and it's not easy to carry off the constantly chipper attitude that grates on everyone else. He and Tim Russ have a great double act as Neelix and Tuvok. IMHO, of course. Ditto. Nobody knows what happens at death; people tell stories regardless and that includes a lack of afterlife. Even science says matter isn't destroyed, it just alters form, so that falls right back into the same venue of various theories like reincarnation. I could hypothesize any number of fascinating tangents and theories at this point myself, but why? Especially as given the increasing human population at the expense of all other populations, and that's only scratching the surface. Again, who knows, isn't the here and now not important? And was Neelix truly dead? Simple biology; minutes after one dies everything starts to decompose beyond the ability to revive - which is why that other tv show where graves were dug up to turn everyone into cybermen was far worse than that show's earlier episode where it was claimed "no plants, no carbon dioxide" and that's how they had global cooling in the year 3000. (But that earlier gaffe was 1967, everyone was dumb back then. What's the excuse for 2014's gaffe in repatriating so many decades- and centuries-old decomposed corpses?) I don't recall the episode too much, but unless he was put into a cryogenic freezer just before death, then it's another episode of trying to be all big and epic like TNG's "Ethics" only it falls just as flat...