> why would we not share a common set of beliefs/practices/language? Religions are big things with many purposes. One of those purposes is self-improvement, an

> why would we not share a common set of beliefs/practices/language? Religions are big things with many purposes. One of those purposes is self-improvement, and it would be useful for religious people and secular people to be able to communicate about the same set of routines using the same set of vocabulary and so on. However, this seems to introduce one of two strange situations. A religious person adopting purely secular sets of beliefs and practices may find some of this to conflict with their religion. They're moving from one intellectual/psychological/social context to another. While a secular person might be able to point at how rather non-optimal a set of mental machinery might be, it is also quite likely that a religious person and a secular one have decidedly different understandings of the utility function for 'optimal' (and at very deep psychological levels). On the other side of that coin, and probably more obviously, a secular person begin asked to acquire religious contexts and practices so as to communicate about this mental machinery would probably find these new shared beliefs/practices/language a bit "crufty". This would be totally understandable because all a secular person here would be after is 'self-improvement' whereas from above 'Religions are big things'. All of these mechanics are suddenly attempting to function outside of the context in which they developed. Diff'rent Strokes and all, ya' know