Is Nirvana redundant? I'm confused over Buddhism's lack of afterlife, yet belief in rebirth.


If there is no soul, how can there be rebirth?
What happens to the five aggregates after death?
Consciousness in Nibbana


From reading answers given on this site, there is no rebirth of the self or consciousness. Logically then any concern of either suffering from bad karma in a next life, or being reborn as an animal is unwarranted.

Although apparently death leads to rebirth, Nirvana appears futile as life will continue to reproduce unhindered. Life is far more effective at producing more life than death is.

What does Nirvana offer that death does not? It would seem they both lead to oblivion.
"No afterlife" means, from a Buddhist perspective, that there is no ego-centered identity to experience that afterlife. After life, the ego entity created by the human mind is no more but the consciousness in which that individual was operating in never dies.

As Andrei_Volkov answered, the Buddhist perspective likens consciousness to a vast ocean. The Five Aggregates are what happens as consciousness becomes embroiled and enmeshed in straits and currents, like tidepools on the coastline where water can be "trapped". If it mixes with pollutants here, it will still contain them if swallowed by a stork or channeled elsewhere. This is karma and it is a causative process stretching infinitely. 

The human brain reasons and automates judgement which can blind one and veil true causation and the true nature of things. For instance, the human brain contains two dedicated regions in the parietal lobe: one to keep track of the body's boundaries ("elbow: check! nose: check! right arm: check!..." and another to keep track of the body in space. These regions greatly contribute to the human sense of ego or I-ness or self. There is no afterlife for this sense of self that is delimited by skin and bound in space. However, consciousness channeled through the eddies of the individual will forever return to the ocean (rebirth) carrying the traces of its course (the five aggregates).

Nirvana, the great blowing or washing out, is only possible when the water returns to its pure and primordial state. Death will always accompany life, and to the Buddhist death is only a turning point on a great wheel of eternity. Nirvana refers to the complete freedom, beyond conception. Nirvana is not a possibility only after death. Despite the rendering of the phrase "to enter Nirvana", it is not an "arrival" like you die and you go there instead of somewhere else. It is freedom from the perspective that otherwise glues consciousness to life, but in an ultimate sense - not a temporary conceptualization within an individual mind's understanding. 

To explicitly answer your question, Nirvana offers nothing -- and death doesn't exist -- it begets more life. Like night and day, they are just vantages from a stationary point on the rotating earth. The sun just shines and gravity just propels and it makes a whole horse-and-pony show out of next to nothing. Again, Nirvana offers nothing.