The problem is that for the vast majority of people religious beliefs are instilled while they are children, within a cultural context, and are empirically hard

The problem is that for the vast majority of people religious beliefs are instilled while they are children, within a cultural context, and are empirically harder to change than things like programming language preference. For many, they're not even open to discussion. That's in fact why there are religious protections. It's simply unrealistic to expect people to give up their upbringing just to get a certain job. You identify the problem in your paragraph re: Haskell. Suppose I want to set up some organization working to start a new polity. Let's say that as a baseline, I want to recruit people who think it is wrong to resort to violence over say cartoons that are offensive to their religious beliefs. Or maybe I want to recruit people who have no desire to bar people of different sexual orientations from fully participating in love and social life. I can't do that in the current legal system because religious beliefs are a protected class. I understand why we got here, historically, but now that we're not burning people at the stake, I don't see why their religious beliefs should supersede the larger societal norms (of a new society). It's a matter of how strongly those beliefs are held and the futility of trying to convince people to abandon such deeply-held and meaningful beliefs. Better to tilt the scales by not inviting them to the party, regardless of which way things evolve later. EDIT> For any given religion I recognize that there are many possible doctrinal and individual interpretations. But how to measure the individual's preferences as a filter on admission? It's easy to fake answers to a questionnaire. How to establish an org without inviting the griefers, and without running afoul of protected classes? I mean you could do it the old-fashioned nudge-nudge-wink-wink way, but that's a huge legal vulnerability.