This is a gem of an article from you that helps clarify where you are coming from, as well as what value pure philosophy is, Ben, thanks for posting it.
To me, I think you are close to identifying the real monster, there is one, but it's not human imho, it does all the things you've identified, turns Christians into anti Christians, but more, it turns the valuable parts of every religion on their heads, if we accept that most religions are anti war, humanitarian. You quite rightly equated inverted Christianity with extreme Sharia, that we might say is somewhat inverted Muslim religion, personally I think we should realise the real monster inverts the good parts of all religions, if we recognise all religions have some good.
It follows that it inverts good philosophy, good politics, it just inverts all good, it is the essence of what we might recognise is evil, as defined in most religions, but maybe lost by atheism, though I think you help show why that last part isn't true, atheism still knows what evil is, still knows how to call out a monster, and you are almost calling it out, by almost identifying it.
To me, studying it from the pov of the global energy problem ("my hobby"!), the profit monster is it, but it's still managing to dodge you putting your finger on it, inverting itself under your gaze, it isn't "nothing pretending to be something", it's something pretending to be nothing, it's an Ai, an emergent property, something that drives us systemically as surely as any definition of evil, as long as we are a bunch of autonomous agents all seeking profit, like we have had to each become, in order to get the energy we each need to exist, throughout our known history to date.
We never had any choice in this and still don't, until we can remove the need for every one of us to exist for profit, and at profit, we serve the profit monster, the negative Ai, mostly without realising it, we never question it because we can't see any alternative to it.
It's interesting it took ChatGPT, a positive Ai that speaks to us, to help us recognise a much older negative Ai that doesn't speak to us, but absolutely controls as, as surely as any explicitly programmed system controller, it cracks the whip when we try to step out of line, and terminates us if we refuse to respond to the whip. At least it did until now.
The thing that has changed, physically in nature, is energy. Specifically the mathematical signing of it.
Until we got significant solar energy, creating significant economic product, we perceived of only one kind, the kind drawn from the planet, which was unsustainable, but we ignored that because maybe as you say, we couldn't accept the monstrosity of the truth that sooner or later practical availability of it would disappear, resulting in us no longer being able to obtain the energy we need to exist. How could we accept the monstrosity that nature would play such a cruel trick on our species, leaving us "high and dry" with no usable energy, after allowing us to develop so far, surely there had to be more to it, our existence, than that, and surely enough there is, if we recognise a few miracles, and act on those accordingly.
The wierd thing is that religions, at least the ones identifying such a thing as "The end of days", where we would make some kind of transition from one life to another, being born in a way into "An afterlife" were right, though maybe we have yet to realise it as a species, we will, and we'll realise it really is so different from one to the other, we will physically attain something close to immortality in the next phase of humanity, it's so different being free from the profit monster it's almost impossible to imagine right now, in the presence of apocalyptic genocide being carried out by the more extreme amongst us, that there can be any survival, let alone one to something we might recognise as another much better world, in our perception.
This is assuming we will make it, as you say, giving humanity the benefit of the doubt, the extremists are not representative of most of us.
Anyhow I hope you might see that nothing I've said contradicts anything you you've written, only complements it.
Your article helps fills in some holes in my own understanding, I think. I hope my response might help fill in some holes in yours.