Does nature have a religion?

Good and bad might be some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil to humans, but the reality is that it is the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience.

So while culture is the stories we tell the children to get them to behave, nature is some enormous computational process, that doesn't always come up with the answers we want to hear.

Often too much good can be bad and some bad can be educational. The mind evolved to deal with problems.

The flaw with monotheism is that ideals are not absolutes.

Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The 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, the codes, behaviors, habits, beliefs, that enable a healthy society.

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

While the last 3000 years, of going from mostly tribal societies to nations of millions of people might seem a long time from our point of view, in terms of evolution, it is fairly short. The technology has evolved far more than the sociology.

Keep in mind, Ancient Israel was a monarchy. The Big Guy Rules. Like the religion.

Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The various ideals, metaphors, memes making up the human communication of the time interacting.

The Christian Trinity originated out of 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 was why the story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus had such resonance around the Greek world of the time.

By the time Constantine adopted it as the state religion of Rome, Christianity had also started to calcify, so the monotheism served to validate the Roman Empire, while the origins of the Trinity were shrouded by the Holy Ghost. The Catholic Church was the eschatological basis for European monarchy. Divine right of kings, rather than consent of the governed.

When the West went back to democracy and republicanism, it required separation of church and state, culture and civics.

Religion has all been far more about indoctrination, than enlightenment.

We are linear, goal oriented creatures in this cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality. It's like we have yet to internalize the implications of the world being round, not flat.

What goes round, comes round.