Maybe it's just that most philosophy is just dense, regurgitated nonsense?

Simple question;

Would a spiritual absolute be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, or an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell?

Isn't the universal the elemental, not the ideal?

Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The creeds, codes, stories and heroes at the heart of a culture are ideals, but are they absolutes?

Art looks to the ideals. Science looks to the elements.

You would think that the core concept of Western civilization was to assume an ideal as absolute would have had philosophers crawling all over it centuries ago, but no.

Remember democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures and Rome adopted a monotheistic sect as state religion as the Empire was rising from the ashes of the Republic. The Big Guy Rules. Ancient Israel was a monarchy. One people, one rule, one god.

Morality is not an absolute, since if it was, it couldn't be transgressed, like a temperature below absolute zero. Morals are ideals. The codes that enable a healthy society, in tune with its situation. What might work in one region, might not work as well in another. Obviously the basics are universal, like taking care of the young, but that's just it, they are the basics.

That the West counted on an all-knowing god as its moral policeman, meant that when fear of god died, there was no organically evolved set of principles to replace it, the Will to Power rose to fill the void. Those with no code are best at that game.

Good and bad are not some cosmic conflict, between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience.

What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken.

So while nature operates as some enormous computational process, our cultural beliefs are little more than carrot and stick.

Often too much good can be bad and some bad can be good.

I can go on, but I find most people can't or won't look outside the boxes around their minds.

Especially those who have spent much of the lives in classrooms and only know what they read.