An interesting book on the origins of Western civilization is Gilbert Murray's The Five Stages of Greek Religion;

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/30250/30250-h/30250-h.htm

The theme of which is the basis of what became the Olympians were primordial fertility rites, where the young god was born of the old god and the earth mother, but by the age of classical Greece, tradition had overcome renewal and Zeus didn't give way to Dionysus. So the story of Jesus(interesting phonetic similarities), as one of royal blood, crucified and risen, served a deep desire for renewal.

To the Ancients, especially the Jews, given the formative experience was the forty years in the desert, giving us the Ten Commandments, monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. The singular spirit running through the tribe.

By the time and as the Romans adopted and co-opted Christianity as state religion, as the empire was rising from the ashes of the Republic, it too had started to harden into tradition, so the basis of the renewal, the Trinity, was obscured and the focus became entirely about the monotheism. Essentially serving a political function. The Big Guy Rules. Divine right of kings.

When the West went back to more populist forms of governance, it required the separation of church and state, culture and civics.

All of which creates much of our societal neuroses.

Logically 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.

Ideals are not absolutes and it is extremely destabilizing to assume they are, because there are multitudes of ideals; truth, beauty, platonic forms, to name a few, so if every group, cult, ideology, political movement, religion, personal obsession is to be assumed absolute, rather than a motivational focus, there is no network to connect the nodes.

Good and bad become some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, rather than the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental.

So there can be no grey areas, no spectrum of colors, only absolutes coalescing around the increasingly focused poles.

https://johnbrodixmerrymanjr.medium.com/a-pre-mortem-of-western-civ-4795193e8241