GEC, you make interesting points. It raises the issue of states of mind and their relationship to the commons. Like love, thekind of passionate certainties that religion brings out can induce conclusions which look extreme when compared to the average muddle of experience in the town square. And of course the probelm with those states is that no two are quite comparable. That's fundamentally why the state and religion have to be kept clearly separate; every religious experience invites solutons of an extreme sort (just look at life under Sharia law, Puritan law, Amish law, orthodox Jewish codes, etc.). From the commons point of view all of these things seem arbitrary and not conducive to the best survival. The introduction of arbitraries into the solutions of civic life just makes things complex and unworkable.

A