Well, it's an automatic response for most of us, now. Although I use "oh my goddess" as often as "oh my god." There is, indeed, a lot of cross contamination between different religions, but I do believe it's more than that. Similarities often exist between religions that haven't had a chance to contaminate one another. If you ask me there's also often a universal truth behind them that will translate into any belief system. Even atheists make sense of the world, in their own way. ;-)
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That, or because we are a transitory race, we move from one place to another taking pieces of our religions with us and creating new ones. If you look how the theories of the origins of humans, we have a few places we've developed, and then branched out from. For instance, one of my favorite examples is Lilith of Jewish lore. There are so many goddesses that are her exact story, like she makes an appearance in one of Gilgamesh's stories, where she resides in a tree that Inanna wants to use for a throne. Gilgamesh then comes and shoos her away. Then there's Lamia, from Greek lore, that share many traits of Lilith. Some scholars believe Lilith might have been someone in history, a ruler or leader at some point, maybe. How Mesopotamians and the other tribes would show reverence to the new leader or 'god-like' being was that they would create new stories about them defeating former leaders. They believe that since she plays a role like that in a story, she was likely a leader, and people who still followed her spread her throughout other lands that they traveled to.
Sorry, I went off on a tangent. We're a race with a terrible sense curiosity and need for exploration, so I believe that we just took bits and pieces of our lives and carried them with us to new parts of the world.
Also, caaaaaaaaaaaaaaake. I want it. All of it.