I think there are a range of conceptual issues that should be further explored, given the state of discourse.

For one thing, to culture, good and bad equate with right and wrong. That cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil.

While in the larger, biological reality, they are simply the beneficial and the detrimental. The elemental 1/0 of sentience. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken.

This is because it is the function of culture to get everyone on the same wavelength. Synchronize the community as that larger social super organism, based on the same languages, rules, measures, etc.

Meanwhile our intellectual abilities arose from dealing with the problems. No pain, no gain. As well as that too much of a good thing can have negative consequences.

Not only are there many shades of gray between black and white, but all the colors of the spectrum between light and dark.

Which gets into the socially charged issue of religion.

To the Ancients, gods were metaphors. In this view, monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. Ancient Israel was a monarchy. The Big Guy Rules. Like the religion.

Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The various elements, forces, factions, etc. playing their parts. The origins of the Christian Trinity go to fertility rites. The young god, born in the spring, to the old sky god and earth mother. Though by the age of 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 root. As metaphor.

Though when Constantine co-opted it as the state religion of Rome, it was for the monotheism, as the Empire solidified. The Big Guy Rules. While the origins and implications of the Trinity were shrouded in the Holy Ghost.

So 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 popular forms of government, it required separation of church and state, culture and civics, morality and law.

The problem with the Western, Catholic concept of God, the "all-knowing absolute," is that ideals are not absolutes.

Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The core codes, creeds, heroes, narratives that serve as the locus, the center of gravity, for all cultures 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 codes, habits, beliefs, behaviors, relationships that enable a healthy society.

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

The last 3000 years, of going from mostly tribal cultures, to nation states of millions and now billions of people, might seem like a long time, from our individual points of view, but from an evolutionary timeframe, it is an eye blink.

While our technology might be fairly evolved, much of our sociology is still stuck back in the Bronze Age, when those original religious doctrines, the childhood memories and lessons of culture, were originally formulated.

What are the Ten Commandments, if not a primordial constitution? Obey the Big Guy. Don't mess with your neighbor's wife, or take his stuff. Don't covet what you don't have and be happy with what you do, etc.

Not quite freedom of speech, or trial by a jury of one's peers, but a good start.