Western philosophy does tend to get lost in the weeds and miss the bigger picture.

Consider that logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell.

While this top down father figure lawgiver might be a useful social contruct, for instilling respect for authority in a constantly regenerating population, an ideal is aspirational while an absolute is elemental. When people assume their ideals as absolute, the effect is fundamentalism. It would have been useful if the philosophers could have dissected that a few centuries ago.

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. So any community does need to develop some framework of acceptable behavior, but positing it as absolute, tends to make them very disagreeable to anyone who differs. Organisms synchronize, ecosystems harmonize.

Consider that democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures, as that was how the Ancients formulated multiculturalism, while monotheism equated with a monoculture. One people, one rule, one god.

The Romans adopted Christianity as the Empire solidified and remnants of the Republic were shed. Though it retained vestiges of pantheism in the Trinity, which came out of the Greek year gods. The son as the spring, reborn of the sky god and earth mother. Which had to be seriously plastered over, by an all powerful church with little interest in female power, or the premise of regeneration. Though Martin Luther did try to do what Jesus tried with Judaism, push the reset button. Which was why the Greeks adopted him as a useful metaphor for their efforts to move beyond religious cultures that had become institutional and stagnant.

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

Where were the philosophers?

The West is obsessed with the idea of the singular. Everything is an object, from atoms to individuals, but the reality is these nodes exist in context. Nodes and networks. Organisms and ecosystems. Desire and judgement. Energy and form. Verbs and nouns. Liberal and conservative. Expansion and consolidation. Absolute and infinite.

Yin and yang, not God Almighty.

Where are the philosophers?