We learn from the older generation and they from theirs, going back to the origins of civilization.

It's like a pearl, slowly built out of layers added and polished by the oyster. Which all started with a grain of sand.

Or a tree starts as a small sapling and adds rings on rings. Though often that center will have rotted out, when it is old.

Yet those way back when had a much more basic and limited worldview than we do today. Often what is preserved is what suits subsequent elites, as icons to wave in front of their followers.

What if these basic beliefs are simply wrong?

The logical fallacy of monotheism is that ideals are not absolutes. Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The core codes, creeds, heroes, narratives at the gravitational center of every culture are ideals.

The universal, on the other hand, is the elemental, so a spiritual absolute would be that essence of sentience, from which life rises, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which it fell. The light shining through the film, than the stories playing out on it.

Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The many ideas and ideals interacting, competing operating.

The origins of the Trinity go to fertility rites. The young god born in the spring to the old sky god and the earth mother. Though by the age of the Olympians, Zeus didn't give way to Dionysus. tradition prevailed over renewal. Which provided fertile ground for the story of the resurrection of Jesus, to take root.

In this world, monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. Politically expressed as monarchy. Ancient Israel was a monarchy.

When Constantine adopted Christianity as the state religion of Rome, it too had started to calcify and so the original Jewish monotheism served to validate the Empire finally coalescing. The Big Guy Rules.

So the Catholic Church served as the eschatological basis for European monarchy. Divine right of kings. As opposed to consent of the governed.

While the origins of the Trinity where shrouded in the Holy Ghost, as the Church didn't do renewal, or women.

When the West went back to democracy and republicanism it required separation of church and state, culture and civics.

As fear of God faded, as moral policeman, there hasn't been a strong social code to replace it and so the will to power rose to fill the void.

Yet a in healthy society, one's worth needs to be a function of what they add, not what they can extract. Which is why our culture is necrotic.

Meanwhile every ideology, cult, belief system appetite, etc, has to proclaim its universality and so it's all against all.

So many patches have been added to this mess, it resembles a mummy.