Considering the Judeo-Christian religious narrative, starting with the original Exodus, is the seed at the core of Western civilization, magnified and homogenized for the American public, the psychology of belief is well worth exploring. As it is that deeply emotional and communal need for belief that literally requires the suspension of further thought. As is evident in the various reactions to Netanyahu's speech before congress today.

Consider that what our minds tend to pick out as signal from the noise is what resonates and synchronizes with our prior sense of reality. Then we bond to those on similar wavelengths, in a process that is carried and built on through the generations. Effectively back to the dawn of culture. That narrative flow that makes us a society, based on the same languages and stories told in them.

Remember Exodus gave us the Ten Commandments. Essentially the founding document of Western civilization. Its Constitution.

Which, under all the mythologizing, is just a fairly basic set of rules for a Bronze Age tribe on its own, in the wilderness. Don't question the big spirit. Don't mess with your neighbor's wife, or take his stuff. Be happy with what you have and don't keep coveting more. Etc.

It's like the grain of sand at the center of the pearl, or core of the tree, around which all the succeeding rings grew.

Yet in the intervening 3000+ years, the spirit of this particular tribe has been determined to be absolute and universal. Which is a category error. It is an ideal, not an absolute.

Like that grain of sand at the center of the pearl, it might be central to all that has built up around it, but there are lots of other pearls out there.

Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The core codes, creeds, heroes, narratives at the center of every society 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 those ideals, the codes, behaviors, beliefs, relationships that sustain a healthy society.

Traditionally that one's status be a function of what one adds, not what one can extract.

Though in the course of the last 3000 years, humanity has gone from mostly those tribal communities to nations of hundreds of millions of people and while the technology has evolved, much of the sociology is still stuck well in the past.

We need to better understand those social nodes exist in larger networks. Organisms and ecosystems.

Zionism seems determined to re-litigate the dispute the Zealots had with the Romans. That their god didn't submit to any other gods.

What if the Angles and the Saxons both had messianic cores, that didn't allow them to iron out their differences? Where would Western Civ be now?

It is an enormous stumbling block to further evolution.

https://medium.com/@johnbrodixmerrymanjr/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-western-mind-906dc73cffe2