What is going on? The West can blow up other countries left and right, but somehow we are the moral overlords when it comes to other countries doing anything remotely similar. Was everyone really born yesterday?
When it’s millions and billions of people, it’s not so much culture and politics, as it is biology and physics causing what is going on.
To culture, good and bad are some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, while in nature they are the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience.
This is because a community has to function as a larger organism, so much of culture arises as social control mechanisms. For example, logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence of biological sentience from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. Ideals are not absolutes and treating them as such tends to empower the most close minded.
Consider how memes go viral in society and how it has always been so, since long before there were humans. So the concept of the group as a single organism, a hive mind, is integral to our deep sense of society. This would also be applied to many aspects of reality, consequently the origins of theism. Poly, pan and mono.
By the time of the Ancient Greeks, the belief systems had solidified into the classic pantheon we read about today. It was in pantheistic societies that democracy and republicanism originated, as that was part of how they analogized the multiculturalism that developed as various groups learned to live in relative harmony, without identifying as a single group. In fact, monotheism was analogous to a monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. Remember the formative experience for Judaism was being isolated in the desert for forty years. Giving us the Ten Commandments.
Gnostic Christianity arose in the Greek world, as a way to breath new life into the classic religions, as the story of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection was somewhat analogous to the old tradition of year gods. The son reborn in the spring, of the sky god and earth mother. It was the basis of the Trinity.
Though the Romans adopted it as a state religion as the Empire solidified after a few centuries of fighting among the oligarchs, as to…
