We'd have to dig pretty far down into the cultural foundations to find the reasons for our beliefs.

For example, a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. It's a useful political construct to promote worship of the big guy on top, but the ideal is aspirational, while the absolute is elemental. When we assume our ideals to be absolute, it does empower the close minded and confuse the open minded. A few millennia of philosophers haven't unwrapped that baby.

Remember democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures, because they were how the Ancients expressed multicultural society. Monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one narrative, one spirit.

Synchronization over harmonization.

The Romans adopted Christianity as the Empire solidified and vestiges of the Republic were being shed.

Good and bad are not some cosmic conflict between righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental, the 1/0 of sentience.

When we assume good to be aspirational, rather than elemental, conflicts do become a race to the bottom, as all the higher order complexity, nuance and subjectivity is suspect.

Money is the social contract enabling mass societies, but we have come to see it as a commodity to mine from society. Econ 101 says it is both medium and store, but blood is a medium, fat is a store. They shouldn't be too easily mixed.

As a contract, the asset is backed by a debt, so storing the asset requires generating debt, consequently our entire economy is designed to generate debt, because the medium has become the message.

Though it is difficult to dig too deeply into all the various sources of our culture, as it tends to cross too many wires for most people.

Here is an essay where I've tried tying some of these points together;

https://medium.com/predict/peeling-the-paradigm-1ceab7e774b0