What if reality tends toward circular and cyclical? More rock, paper scissors, than one ultimate destination?

The difference between human culture and nature is that as people have to follow some general set of rules in order to co-exist, good and bad have come to be seen as some cosmic duel between the forces of righteousness and evil.

While in nature, they are the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken.

The problem this creates is that when good is viewed as an ideal, rather than elemental, all the higher order complexity, nuance and subjectivity is suspect, such that conflicts quickly become a race to the bottom, of polarized sides. Rather than such problems causing more adaptation, development and social evolution.

The logical flaw of God as a spiritual absolute is the absolute is elemental, not aspirational, so a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell.

To the Ancients, monotheism was monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures, as they expressed multicultural situations and cultural conditions.

The Romans adopted and co-opted the gnostic Christianity that had arisen as the classic pagan religions sought to rejuvenate increasingly rigid cultures with the story of the resurrection of Jesus as a parable of rebirth, into the Catholic church, as validation of the Empire having replaced the Republic.

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

This is getting bit long, but the point is there is a lot more baggage built into our civic and cultural models than is apparent on the surface, but as this social, political and economic world continues to break down, these foundations should get more study.