It would seem there is an essential cognitive cycle of expansion and consolidation at work. Which then provides the foundation for the next cycle, like rings on a tree.
So what started out as simple observation and speculation, sort of calcified into culture. Such that what is now religion was originally the Ancients version of speculation and projection, some of which becomes the grain of sand around which later generations build onto, creating our cultural pearls of stable beliefs and models.
What then becomes an interesting speculative foray, is wondering what current assumptions of objective fact break down and prove to be little more than objects of belief.
One tradition which goes to the heart of Western civilization is to see everything as singular, because it all appears connected. Which are diametrically opposed, as connection is the network, while entities are nodes within the network. Process versus form.
Consider the logical fallacy of monotheism is that a spiritual absolute would be that raw essence of sentience, from which life rises, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which it fell.
While the father figure lawgiver might be a useful narrative device to instill respect for culture and authority into a constantly regenerating population, it conflates the ideal, which is aspirational, with the absolute, which is elemental, and that is politically incendiary.
As all the political movements that have sought to replace the political expression of monotheism, monarchy(Divine right of kings), all make the same assumption; That their ideals are universal and no debate is allowed.
Remember that democracy and republicanism evolved in pantheistic societies, the Ancient's analogy of multiculturalism. When the West went back to these forms of bottom up government, it required a separation of church and state, culture and civics. It is hard to formulate a healthy concept of social diversity, when the cultural model is monist idealism.
Another basic observation is that as mobile organisms necessitating a sequential process of perception and having socially evolved in a narrative based culture, the premise of time as the point of the present moving past to future is ingrained very deeply into the group psyche. The reality though, is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no literal "dimension" of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Process goes past to future, as patterns go future to past. Consciousness goes past to future, as thoughts go future to past.
Making time an effect of activity, like temperature, pressure, color, sound, etc. Think frequencies and amplitudes.
Yet if one were to raise this point among the most intellectual and educated, say the high priests of theoretical physics, the response is purely authoritarian. That whatever the logic, one does not question Holy Writ. The conceptual tools have calcified into cultural gods.
Meanwhile these same people publically go on about multiverses and multiworlds and other forms of post-empirical science.
It makes one understand the feedback loops within closed groups of people that do lead to some of religion's more provocative pronouncements.
