What if the problem is monotheism?
Remember democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The family as godhead.
To the Ancients, monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god.
The formative experience for Judaism was the forty years in the desert, giving the Ten Commandments to the Old Testament. Which were basically rules for a functional society.
Ancient Greek religion rose from fertility rites, where the young god was born in the spring, of the old sky god and the earth mother. Though by the time of the Olympians, tradition prevailed over renewal and Zeus didn't give way to Dionysus. Whether it's god, metaphors, or real life, the young will always be in tension with the old. The anarchies of desire versus the tyrannies of judgement.
Which provided fertile ground for the story of Jesus, crucified and risen in the spring. Along with a lot of other social and economic tensions. He was all peace, love and turn the other cheek, except when it came to the moneychangers. That's when they crucified him.
Though by the time Rome adopted it as state religion, tradition had started to prevail again, so the monotheism served to validate the Empire rising from the ashes of the Republic. The Big Guy Rules.
While the essence of the Trinity was buried under the Holy Ghost.
While it might have been a political convenience, what it did was to base Western civilization of the premise of ideals as absolute.
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. More the light shining through the film, than whatever B grade melodrama is playing out on it.
Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The village alter is an ideal. The creed and the heroes of a society are ideals. It is like the eye of a storm, or the grain of sand at the center of a pearl. The black hole at the center of a galaxy. It is the necessary locus of structure.
Yet there are multitudes of such entities spread across infinity. So to claim one's own is the only one universal creed, than not only are all others false and misleading, but their very existence is an affront to the one absolute creed. There is no live and let live. No marching to the beat of a different drummer.
When the West went back to democracy and republicanism, it required the separation of church and state, effectively culture and civics. Which is schizophrenic.
So not only is it all against all, it's myopically naive, like a geocentric cosmology.
What we have today, is simply the point of reductio ad absurdum.
