A very good start. Though I think there are a lot of other aspects required to understand how human culture has developed.

Starting with my own central point of contention, our concept of time has to be improved.

As mobile organisms, our sense of being is this interface between our body and its context, that manifests as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate.

So our concept of time is as the point of the present, moving past to future, collected as narrative and codified as measures of duration.

The evident reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events rise and fall.

There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is conserved, because it is the present, creating time, as well as temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

So energy, as present, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it's the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts the information, signals from the noise.

So we have this dichotomy. The anarchies of desire, versus the tyrannies of judgement. Motor and steering. Head and heart.

Consider as well, that galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in.

To the extent we develop as larger social organisms, government, as executive and regulatory function, is the central nervous system, while money and banking serve as abstracted blood and circulation system.

Unfortunately we are in the interregnum between recognizing government, under all the politics and personalities, is a public utility and realizing the same about banking, but that's another story.

So the two essential dynamics are synchronization, which is centripetal, and harmonization, which is effectively centrifugal. Consequence of the energy carrying forms out, as the nature of form is to coalesce in. Both entropic. Between black holes and black body radiation.

Now religion arose out of a desire to understand, coupled with the need to formulate this understanding. Desire versus judgement.

The essential fallacy of monotheism is that a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. More the light shining through the film, than the images on it. Assuming ideals as absolute is naturally adversarial, given the subjective nature of ideals. Though the father figure lawgiver is a useful device for instilling respect for authority.

Keep in mind democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The many as one.

To the Ancients, monotheism was monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. The formative experience for Judaism was the forty years in the desert, giving us the Ten Commandments.

The basis of the Greek pantheon was the sky god and earth mother giving birth to the new god in the spring, but by classic Greece, it had become set in stone, as Zeus remained supreme and didn't pass it on to Dionysus. Tradition prevailed over renewal. Which was the original power of Christianity in the Greek world. The story of Jesus being crucified and resurrected was a breaking of this mold.

Rome adopted and co-opted gnostic Christianity, as the Catholic Church, for its monotheism, as the Empire was finally solidifying and remnants of the Republic were finally being buried. The Big Guy rules. Divine right of kings.

Then Martin Luther tried pushing the reset button again, but the layers of tradition had grown too thick.

When the West finally went back to more broad based political systems, it required the separation of church and state, culture and civics.

We are linear, goal oriented creatures in a cyclical, circular, feedback generated reality and the endless growth has reached the edge of the planetary petri dish. It's time to balance the centripetal model. The totem at the center is a flatline.

We fluctuate between zero and infinity.