Morality is an ideal, not an absolute.

If morality were absolute, it couldn't be transgressed. Like a temperature below absolute zero.

Morals are the codes, ideals, habits, behaviors, relationships etc, that enable a healthy society.

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

It is just this last 3000 years of going from mostly tribal communities to nations of millions and now billions of people has been rocky.

To the Ancients, gods were metaphors.

In that world, monotheism mean a 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 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 was why the story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus had such organic resonance.

Though by the time Constantine adopted Christianity as the state religion of Rome, it too had started to calcify, so the monotheism served to validate the Empire, while the origins of the Trinity were shrouded by the Holy Ghost.

Leaving the Catholic Church 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.

To culture, good and bad are that cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, because it is the function of culture to synchronize the community into a social super organism. While in the larger reality, they are the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience.

Too much good can turn bad and bad is foundational to learning. Trial and error.

Without the ups and downs, it is a flatline.

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.

When one assumes one's ideals as absolute, there is just that big hammer in the tool box.

The bull is power.

The matador is art.