David,

Having read the article, it seems likely you would engage comments, but as that doesn't seem the case, I'll keep it short.

Personally I grew up on a farm around more animals, than people, so I tend to see culture through the prism of nature, than trying to understand nature within the context of culture.

For one thing, the basic fallacy of monotheism is that ideals are not absolutes. The core codes, creeds, heroes, narrative as the gravitational center of every society are ideals. Without which they would break apart and be scattered to the winds, Tower of Babel.

To the Ancients, gods were the ideals, metaphors, memes, etc. that made up public conversation, as part of the evolution of society and thought. Like Rodin's, The Thinker would be an ideal of cognition.

Monotheism equated with monoculture, one people, one rule, one god. Ancient Israel was a monarchy. Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. Many ideas and ideals competing. Constantine adopted and co-opted Christianity for the monotheism, as he brought the Empire back together. The Big Guy Rules. Making the Catholic version of monotheism the eschatological basis for the next 1500 years of monarchy. When the West went back to democracy and republicanism it required separation of church and state, culture and civics. Somewhat schizophrenic.

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, then the stories playing out on it.

Morality is the ideals that sustain a healthy society. If they were absolutes, they couldn't be transgressed, like a temperature below absolute zero.

While in culture, good and bad might be some cosmic conflict between righteousness and evil, to nature, it's the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental, the 1/0 of sentience. So while the cultures are the stories we tell the children, nature is some ginormous computer program.

So all these world cultures are emergent from the underlaying physics and biology. Trial and error.

Nodes and networks, organisms and ecosystems, synchronization and harmonization.

When the focal point at the center overwhelms the connections with the larger reality, the tendency is to spiral down that rabbit hole in the center.

Since it does seem the West, having failed to fully dominate the rest of the world, is crumbling under the resulting debts, new thinking does have to start somewhere.