Consider the signals we pick out of the noise are what resonates and synchronizes with our prior senses and beliefs, such that it becomes a layering process, like rings of a tree, or an oyster adding and polishing the calcium to build a pearl.

Then that we tend to bond to those on similar wavelengths, extending this centripetal dynamic out to create community.

So religions, traditions, views developed over time and handed down by elders become the foundations on which we build.

Yet over time it does become a game of Chinese whispers. Those core premises might not have been very objective to begin with, then what follows is having to constantly patch the problems.

Consider Ancient Israel was a monarchy. The Big Guy Rules. Like the religion.

Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures.

The origins of the Christian Trinity go back to fertility rites. The young god born in the spring to the old sky god and earth mother. Though by the Olympians, Zeus didn't give way to Dionysus. Tradition prevailed over renewal.

Which provided fertile ground for the story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus to take hold across the Greek dominated world.

By the time Constantine adopted it as the state religion of Rome, it too had started to calcify, so the monotheism served to validate the Empire and bury any vestiges of the Republic. While the origins of the Trinity were shrouded in the Holy Ghost.

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.

Power corrupts.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Martin Luther tried to push the reset button, but only over the corruption, not the premises.

The logical flaw with monotheism is that ideals are not absolutes.

Those core codes, creeds, heroes, narratives at the center of every culture are ideals.

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.

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, codes, behaviors, beliefs, relations, etc. that enable a healthy society.

Traditionally that one's status be a function of what one adds, not what one can extract, but the last several thousand years of going from mostly tribal societies to nations of millions of people has been a fairly steep learning curve. The technology has advanced far more than the sociology.