Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about, as John used to sing. In the end, if you follow the science to as far as you can get - you'll arrive pretty much at probability and probability alone. Old Uncle Albert once quipped that "God does not play dice with the universe," but he might be wrong about that, as the most fundamental things seem, at root, to be almost endless series of random events.
Indeed, we hate to think that the universe itself is just a reflection of what we know in our own lives, that life is a pretty damn random series of events, and what seems important turns out not to be, a chance encounter can change your life, or end it, and indeed its comforting to think that in all that gooey mess, there is a reason for it, a purpose behind it, a hand guiding and shaping the outcome and us with it. Someone more powerful than probability, some hand that in some mysterious way is rolling them laughing bones in such a way that we can beat the house.
Easy to see where that would be attractive to say the least. That something that we all see everyday - indeed some of us are consumed by it - that good things happen to the worst people we've ever met while the really nice and open and good people seem to have to suffer though nothing but crap, setbacks and hard times. Why the nice little lady going down the street for some snacks for her kids get caught in a crossfire and gets gunned down in front of the corner store, while people who have really, really done great wrong, killed many, abuse thousands, in some cases millions, well they live in nice big houses, with sailboats and people to guard them? To think that there is some purpose to that greater than our simple understanding is - has to be - comforting.
I think that some of the Eastern Religions (in capital letters) are a bit more flexable and less prone to extremism then the Western Trilogy, but they offer far less in terms of absolute concrete examples that the three religions of the book offer. In all three of those, there is a god, god is god, and god has a reason for doing what he is doing, and you better not ask why. But for sure that kind of 'reason for events', coupled as all three of them are to a very specific and exact kind of heaven that you too can obtain (thus not only not dying - a pretty neat trick if I do say so myself - but in the process somehow coming to know the why of all of this) with a roadmap for you to follow to get you there.
It's easy to see the allure in that.
