Great idea there Skeptic, I was thinking about making an idea about a theory that may just answer your question for some time now.

Answers to the physical universe are analyzed, theorized, and then put in to scientific laws if the science behind it is right.  So therefore science and the scientific method is the perfect route to take for solving the physical universe.  We all know where laws and individual humans stand on that matter though.  Every human is different when it comes to morality and ethics.

Religion was first organized to help societies grow peacefully with a little bit of spiritual truth behind them.  The main idea behind religion is to have faith and be moral according to whatever holy book that you follow.  For most, faith has been instilled in to your mind since you were a child, and now several are starting to ask "Why?" and then those are the people that turn in to atheists, because well the holy books are not very accurate at all historically speaking and several people have committed horrible acts saying that the book told them to do so.

So now monotheistic religions have become hypocrisies to those that question them.  The eastern religions/philosophies are still going strong, maybe that's why they are more appealing to you Skeptic.  With less hypocrasies there will be more self-aware humans that can believe in them.  Self-awareness is key to the human race, if self-awareness were more widespread then we wouldn't be facing these horrible situations that we are having to go through right now.

I believe when self-awareness mixes with spirituality the individual who is doing this process can realize the divinity of themselves as being equal to Jesus or Buddha or Lao Tzu.  So to me, the divinity of myself, my other-selves (the rest of human kind), even those who aren't self-aware and aren't spiritual, we are all equal.  No one is greater than anyone else, and no one is lesser than anyone else, that idea can be brought further out to even say that I'm not lesser or greater than a leaf on a tree.  We are all just creations of the original creator (whatever it may be), we humans are just closer to knowing the infinite than the leaf on the tree.

That closeness that we have is still an infinite amount of knowledge away from actually being the infinite which should be humbling while we try to prove our dominance over the animal kingdom.  In the same thought process the original creator wont try to prove it's dominance over us, because it did create this physical universe, which means this physical universe (which is infinite) is just the original creator in physical form.

But to sum this up, the appeal of religion and spirituality is that it's an attempt to solve the question of creation in any form, just like science is an attempt to solve the physical universe.  We as humans don't have the brain capacity to truly understand spirituality and creation but we can certainly try.  For now I consider myself a self-aware and spiritual person, and I only wish to help create a better planet to live on by helping out my other-selves in any way, shape, or form.  The golden rule is universal and it's something we humans can do right now.