We shouldn't confuse the ideal with the absolute. One is aspirational, while the other is elemental.

For instance, 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 the film, than the images on it.

When we confuse the two, the practical effect is polytheism. The many versions of the one competing.

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

Remember that democracy and republicanism originate in pantheistic cultures, as they envisioned multiculturalism. The many working together.

The Romans adopted and co-opted Christianity as the Empire solidified and remnants of the Republic were being shed. It retained vestiges of pantheism, in the Trinity. Which came from the cycles of the Greek year gods. The son reborn in the spring, of the sky father and earth mother.

While this element of regeneration is explicit in Christianity, is has been heavily censored, as the Catholic Church assumed to be the immortal institution. At least until Luther tried to do what Jesus tried with Judaism, push the reset button.

When the West went back to less centralized political systems, it required the separation of church and state, culture and civics.

Also good and bad are not some cosmic duel, between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience.

When good is viewed as aspirational, rather than elemental, conflicts become a race to the bottom, of us versus them, as all the higher order complexity, nuance and subjectivity is lost to such moral absolutes.