1) These similarities we see are an artifact of our own beliefs in some way. That is, perhaps if we started believing that people were fundamentally very different, reality would shift as well, and we’d living in a world where people really were very different from one another, their minds really worked differently, etc. Perhaps profound racists live in such a world, for example.

2) But I think what we’re really seeing is a uniformity in the nature of Spirit itself, which is independent of our beliefs about it. In other words, I think there is an ‘objective’ Spirit-substance which has certain properties, and the stories we tell about it tend to coalesce into certain broad patterns that illuminate those properties. I think that many properties of Spirit are reflected in the physical world, too — the whole ‘as above, so below’ principle at work. For example, both the spiritual world and the physical world take the form of a multitude — there are many different parts to them, with an uncountable number of interactions and relationships between them; and yet there is an underlying unity as well (in the physical world, the Grand Unified Theory they’re searching for; in the spiritual world, the monotheistic God, or the common origin of the polytheistic gods, etc.).

So the bottom line is, yes, I think there’s a broad pattern here, and I think it ultimately resides in the properties of Spirit itself.