Billy,
Keep in mind why the West instinctively supports Israel. That it was the Israelite tribal god that became the locus of Western civilization.
That monotheistic nut is what will have to be cracked, before humanity can move on.
Quite simply, ideals are not absolutes.
Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The core codes, creeds, heroes, narratives that serve as the gravitational center of any society and culture are ideals. Without which, they would break apart and be scattered to the winds. Tower of Babel.
The universal, on the other hand, is the elemental. So 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 stories playing out on it.
Morality is not absolute, as it couldn't be transgressed, if it were. Like a temperature below absolute zero. Morals are the ideals that enable a healthy, functioning society. Such as one's worth being a function of how much one adds, not how much one can extract.
Modern economics and bacteria operated on the same infinite growth formula. The problem being when they reach the edge of the petri dish, or the resources. The advantage of multicellular organisms is being able to sense and navigate the surroundings.
Government functions as a nervous system, while money and banking work like blood and the circulation system. With public government and private banking, the banks rule and the only job the flunkies in office have, is running up the debt the financial sector needs to grow metastatically. The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth. "The real money is in bonds."
To the Ancients, gods were part of the evolution of thought and conversation. The ideals, metaphors, memes, concepts, etc, that coalesced as our modern thought processes. Much as Rodin's The Thinker would be an idealization of cognition.
Monotheism, in this context, amounted to a monoculture. One people, one rule, one god.
Politically it evidenced as monarchy. The Big Guy Rules. Like the religion. Ancient Israel was a monarchy.
Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The many ideas and ideals interacting. The Trinity originated out of the Greek year gods. The young god born in the spring, to the old sky god and the earth mother.
Though by the Olympians, Zeus didn't give way to Dionysus. Tradition prevailed over renewal. Which was why the story of the resurrection of Jesus had such fertile ground to take root.
Though by the time Constantine adopted it as the state religion of Rome, he was pulling the eastern and western sides of the Empire back together, so it was the monotheism that served to validate the rule from above. While the Trinity and renewal was obscured by the Holy Ghost.
So the Catholic Church served as the eschatological basis for European monarchy. Divine right of kings, as opposed to consent of the governed.
When the West went back to democracy and republicanism it required separation of church and state, culture and civics.
As for the Jewish version of monotheism, it has remained essentially tribal. The Chosen, versus everyone else, the goyim.
The problem is this tribe as supreme was getting past its sell by date by the Roman Empire, as all the tribes had to come to terms with that larger network and hierarchy. Which the Jews refused to do, so they were kicked out.
The whole turn the other cheek, do unto others, as you would have them do unto you, is a function of existing in that larger world. That what goes round, comes round. Two wrongs don't make a right and unless someone breaks the feedback loop, everyone loses.
Basically humanity has yet to come to terms with the earth being round, not flat and we are reaching the end of the usefulness of the old ways of thinking. Time to clear the attic.
I've been blocked from further posting or commenting on Substack, since making this point, last October, so it does get under someone's skin.
https://medium.com/@johnbrodixmerrymanjr/gods-problems-cdab66ed5f04
