Maybe what they really need to study is logic.

Logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. More the light shining through and animating the film, than the stories played out on it.

Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The family and cycle of life as godhead. The young god born in the spring, of the old sky god and the earth mother. Though by the time of the Olympians, tradition prevailed over renewal and Zeus didn't give way to Dionysus.

Which provided fertile ground for the story of Jesus, crucified for questioning the establishment and risen in the spring.

Jesus was all peace, love and turn the other cheek, except when it came to the moneychangers and that's when they crucified him.

To the Ancients, monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god.

Which tended to be more of an eastern thing, as Asia is more open, so tribal bonding was a more significant aspect, than Europe, where the geography played more of a role in delineating nations. Ancient Israel was a monarchy.

By the time the Romans adopted Christianity, it too had started to calcify, so the monotheism served as validation for the Empire rising from the ashes of the Republic. While the origins of the Trinity were pushed off stage, leaving the spector of the Holy Ghost hanging like an eternal question mark.

Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The creed and heroes around which a society coalesces are ideals. Without them, it will fragment. Tower of Babel.

Yet they are not absolutes. The elemental is the universal, not the ideal. There is no one center of the universe. Even galaxies spiral around their individual black holes. Like the grain of sand at the center of a pearl.

So when the basis of Western culture is the assumption of the ideal as absolute, it is all against all.

Morality is an ideal, not an absolute. The necessary structures and strictures for a healthy society. When the fear of god died, as the moral policeman, it was only the Will To Power that rose to fill the void. Leaving the moral bacteria in charge, so society dissolved into some monetized puddle of debt, to our banking overlords.

Government, as executive and regulatory function, is the nervous system of the social super organism, while money and banking serve as a form of blood and circulation system. With public government and private banking, the banks rule and the only real job the flunkies allowed in office have, is running up the debt the banks need to grow metastatically.

Since the military is the only public utility they will accept, our political stage actors are out playing cowboys and Indians on the other side of the planet, while the country rots.