Ben,

Logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which life rises. Not an ideal, be it wisdom, judgement, comedy, whatever, from which it fell. The fact we are aware, than the focus of our awareness.

Assuming the the ideal, which is aspirational, to be absolute, which is elemental, might be useful to coalesce a diverse group, but it's still conceptually fallicious. All the various monotheisms tend toward absolutism, when they are not being crushed underfoot by other absolutists.

Good and bad are not some cosmic dual between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience. Life, as well as wisdom, is emergent and earned, not ordained.

It's just that while we are driven by our desires, we are steered by our decisions and so the focus tends to be on the patterns, the signals, rather than the processes generating them.

Not all desires are healthy, nor all decisions wise. It is the fluctuation between the two. Live and learn.

We are still in a fairly primitive stage of cultural evolution. Our biology is far more advanced than our sociology.