You cannot serve two masters

In the standard Gospels it is often necessary to make rather extreme substitutions for anything that makes sense to emerge. None of the Gospels appears to be much less than a century later than the life of the supposed person, and the suppression of anything interesting does not take anything like that long; it probably happens more or less immediately.

So consider:

No man can serve two masters ... You cannot serve God and Mammon.

What this may really mean is: You cannot serve both the individual/reality and society.

This was the fundamental conflict between the Gnostics and Pauline Christianity. The Gnostics devalued social goings-on. Pauline Christianity conflated God and society, which gave it much greater marketability. The concept of God was swallowed up in, and dissolved into, the much more dominant concept of society, or ‘other people’.

It may be observed that maintaining more than one source of significance is decentralising. The source of significance which normally obliterates all others is society. Society is not, however, a possible focus of centralisation, being fundamentally a decentralising influence.

So the fundamental conflict, for anyone proceeding in the direction of centralisation, is that between the individual and society, or objective reality and society.