It seems we worship what we perceive as the prime mover to our existence. Maybe not necessarily contra Aristotle, but con Aristotle - to build yet another layer onto his sediments - we could say there are multiple prime movers, or simply movers acting within this greater space, and perhaps Aristotle understood this.
But we seem to have slowly come to the conclusion over the last couple of centuries that this greater space - which really doesn't hold any character at all but is simply everything - is this sort of circumscribed prime mover which causes everything, and it is something we can clearly perceive, and what arises from that conclusion is the attempt to locate the prime mover in this lesser mover that brings shape to one's existence, which is really only one of the many waves drifting over the cosmic plane, so to speak.
So then you have groups claiming their prime mover is better than yours, and so on, and if really your prime mover is all there is, and that the other guy's prime mover is simply a lie, what is to become of him?
See this is a tough problem to solve. When you sit down and take the time to think everything out, you say "oh right, so it is the cosmos, the one love, the god figure which is really the prime mover and all these selfish bastards have it wrong worshiping wealth and idols," but then all these selfish bastards really believe it in their hearts that these wealth objects and idols and power exercises are the prime movers, because all the prime mover idiots that came before them tried to convince them that their big old patriarchal figure in the sky was the prime mover, and these old patriarchal figure enthusiasts thought this was the case because they were trying so damn hard to understand what the prime mover really was, or what the cosmos really was, and what exactly it was they should be worshiping, because the idiots before them were worshiping wealth and idols, and then so on.
So maybe it was the attempt to try to really understand this prime mover nature, and over time the attempt to attach to one's own limited understanding - as one really just exists in a certain time and place - that was causing these groups to elevate their historical position into the position of the all. Then if you want your followers to live the right life according to what you feel, it helps building up all these rules, myths, and personalities that express that feeling.
It is not that it is a bad thing in itself, but the mistake many of these rulers make in their pride and fear is that they attempt to make this system eternal, without telling their followers that hey, it is just a construction in historical time to make living a little easier, and sooner or later, it will dissolve, and you'll have to build your own. Of course it is the ruler and follower psychology that leads to this mistake in the first place. There is this built in need to control everything, to shepherd everyone into the safe pen, even if it means shearing and killing them.
It takes stepping away from schema, and actually relaxing one's attempt to understand, to get to really appreciate that eternal present, that one's historical time and space has a character of its own, and that one can celebrate it and shape it to live better, but also that there are other movements, waves that will intersect with one's own, and that beyond the good and evil valuations that those collisions generate, it is all simply happening.
All this mystical language is an attempt to bring the cosmos closer to one's self, but one is still doing just that: attempting to bring the cosmos closer to one's self, whereas the cosmos is everything: the good and evil, the positive and negative, and that its true nature is not directly perceivable, but hinted at in the relations between the positive and negative. You glimpse it by looking away; permit me this cliche when I say that staring straight into the sun causes only blindness.
Of course this has all been figured out time and time again; it just seems to take figuring it out in one's own time and in one's own language, to really believe it and act on it. Well and hope we can get better at this.
