The essence of the concept of gods is as ideals.

Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The codes, creeds, heroes, narratives at the core of every society are ideals. Morality is an ideal. The rules required of a functioning society.

The essence of a healthy society is public responsibility, with rights as reward. When rights are ordained and responsibility is optional, everyone grabs their slice and runs.

Some people, many people, view money, power and war as ideals.

The premise of monotheism is there is only one god.

It originated as the tribal spirit of Judaism. Basically a guardian angel, during the wandering in the desert.

Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. Greek religion emerged out of fertility rites. The young god, born in the spring, to the old sky god and the earth mother. The basis of the Trinity.

Though by the age of the Olympians, Zeus didn't give way to Dionysus. Tradition prevailed over renewal. As the old are loathe to give way to the young.

Which provided fertile ground for the story of Jesus, resurrected in the spring, as a story of life prevailing over the forces against it.

Though by the time Rome adopted it as state religion, it too had started to calcify, so the monotheism served to validate the Empire rising from the ashes of the Republic. The Big Guy Rules, like the religion.

Ancient Israel was a monarchy. So it served as the eschatological basis for the next 1500+ years of monarchy.

Given the universal is the elemental, not the ideal, a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which life rises, not an ideal of wisdom, judgement, love, etc, from which it fell. more the light shining through the film, than the events played out on it.

The problem with making an Almighty God the moral policeman, was that as fear of God faded, the will to power rose to fill the void. Might is right. There was no organic code.

Morality is not absolute, because if it were, it could not be transgressed, like a temperature below absolute zero.

Culture assumes good and bad as some cosmic conflict, between the forces of righteousness and evil, while in nature, it's the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience.

This is because societies have to function as one, while nature is an enormous computational process, that doesn't alway give the answers we want to hear.

sometimes to much good can be bad and a fair amount of bad can be healthy.

Our minds are not an effect of luxuriating in the good, but dealing with the bad.