How do we know those ideas we are supposed to imbibe are not shadows as well?

For instance, the overriding paradigm of Western civilization has been monotheism. Though this father figure lawgiver has been a useful narrative device for instilling respect for authority and one's culture into an ever regenerating population, its basic logical fallacy would be that a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell.

It conflates the ideal, which is aspirational, with the absolute, which is elemental. Can anyone spot the rather incendiary consequences of assuming one's ideals to be absolutes? The effect of this logical error has been that every ideology to evolve in the shadow of monotheism also tends to see their ideals as beyond question.

This is not the fault of religion, which is a social function, to do what it takes to bind a community into a larger whole and in many normal situations, it works quite well. The ones to blame would be those given the mantle of intellectual expertise, famous or not, for not peeling apart the logic of this cultural artifact, rather than just dismissing it as mere superstition.

Frankly the canons are full of such errors. Is time really the point of the present, moving past to future, or is it change, turning future to past. Physics codifies it as measures of duration and treats it as similar to a spatial dimension, but if it is just an effect of change, it is similar to temperature, pressure, color and sound. Frequencies and amplitudes.

Is money a commodity, or is it a contract, between the individual and society? As such is it personal property, or a public utility, like roads. Do we actually own it, or are we just using it, like the section of road we are on? Remember it is a medium and it's not our picture on it.

Yet academia seems far more concerned deifying its own heros, than really digging into the basics.

Drinking its own bathwater, as we provincials would put it.