"It's necessary in the second half of life to develop a religious attitude"

But see—the thing is—you don't have to know you have a religious attitude, and you definitely don't have to take on any form of organized religion. It's just a matter of believing in something beyond the material and the logical. Many people do that but never realize they're doing it. Example—many people use politics as a substitute religion. Or atheism. Or what have you. Anime maybe? Hmmm....

Lol well, you're not wrong about that. Of necessity the study of the human mind is a pseudoscience. It can't be dissected or studied chemically or in any other quantifiable way, but only through the methods of psychology. The same is true for religion, spirituality, and on and on. Science fails in that realm because it's outside of its effective range. But then science is only the study of the physical world after all, by its own admission. You can't rely on it for everything.

All hail the new religion of Materialism! All that exists are atoms, and energy is merely their movement. I guess that makes us all automatons then?

@Friedrich Kugelschreiber Exactly. And THAT'S what people are missing—any kind of organizing system that tells them how to live morally. Religion and spirituality bring meaning into human lives, science can't do that—it can only tell us facts. It doesn't touch on the inner world, the world of thoughts, feelings, dreams and intuition, while the unconscious (home of all things religious and spiritual) emerges from that world specifically to tell us about it. It doesn't communicate in facts and logic, that's all the language of the conscious mind (shallow surface mind). The deep meaning emerges from the unconscious in symbolic language, and must be interpreted as such. That's religious language, not logic and reason.

We spent far longer as animals than as people. The conscious mind only evolved when we stood upright and started using language. We were perfectly able to live on the unconscious alone for aeons before that—it's the native language of the mind. Conscious thought is the new arrival, and it works very differently. It isn't capable of touching the deep core of mind. When we collectively turned our backs on that (starting with the Enlightenement) we severed our ties with the natural self inside, and ever since we've been plagued with all the modern anxieties and neuroses that characterize our time.

We've lost touch with the fact that religion speaks in metaphor. It's poetic, not literal, but in modern times people insist on trying to understand it literally. That makes it into gibberish and totally meaningless. Not only that, but the big organized religions have lost touch with what religion was the beginning. They've become dogmatic and mostly literal.