Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

If you think the masses don't require myths, you have a higher opinion of humanity than I do. But the way I have heard you deride the masses, I actually don't think you have a very high opinion of them, so I'll dig in.  correct

People, especially "the masses", often don't have the time or inclination to think for themselves. They have agency to decide plenty of things in their life. Whether/where to go to college. What job they want to do. Who they want to marry. But when it comes to the BIG questions, very few people in this world are truly philosophical and can handle the idea that "it's all made up bullshit and I have to face a world that is almost entirely myth-based."  a huge reason for this is that time to wonder about random shit is a luxury most don't have, they have to work or hustle or whatever just to have a place to live

So they NEED myths. They CRAVE it. The myths underpinning society are the only reason we have society.  they only need them for the things they don't understand - god of the gaps.......we have very few gaps left

Now, you may say that religion are old-school myths, out of date, and not based on objective reality (i.e. existence of the invisible man in the sky). Upon that, I agree. However, they were for a very long time, VERY effective at giving people a stable and clear idea of how to act in the world (morals/ethics), an authority structure to follow (clergy), and an unfalsifiable reward/punishment system built in to enforce compliance (heaven/hell).

But if you eliminate religion, you have NOT eliminated the masses' need for myths. The myths exist, to give people who don't have the time, capability, or inclination to think philosophically, a coherent structure in which to understand the world and their place in it.  we could work on providing them with the luxury of time in order to wonder and think and evolve past this

So in the absence of religion, you need new myths to replace it. You have a vacuum that needs filling. And I don't think we, as described as "American society in general", have done a very good job of that.

The vacuum is filled with knowledge.  Honestly, the 2 biggest reasons religions persist isn't your well-put, well-thought-out post about myths, but 1) tradition and 2) god of the gaps (essplainin' things the don't understand)

We understand most of the big questions besides the origin of the cosmos, they just don't know that or care about it or are freed up to know it.  And tradition is simply a bad idea on how to keep everything the same.

I look forward to freeing up a lot of that untaxed church land for public/private use, I must admit.

Here we can see a correlation of course, but it's perhaps not as strong as some might have thought, going from 55% for HS degreed folks to 47% for college grads.

Again, put this up against the same info from 30 years ago.
You're like the king of half-data.

Honestly, we do have people with tech education working for us. They are CAD operators and survey technicians. Most of the latter work outside, collecting data or pounding stakes in the ground for construction. They are highly compensated.

We have a cleaning service every Saturday. If your personal trash is full before that, you take it to the dumpster outside.

Trucks are inspected randomly for cleanliness.

We're kinda old school.

To add on to this.. when we first started the company it was me, my partner, a CAD tech and a survey tech.

My partner and I took turns doing janitor tasks every Friday after work.

Needless to say, I think people like us really have a ton of respect for janitors/cleaning people.

The vacuum is filled with knowledge.  Honestly, the 2 biggest reasons religions persist isn't your well-put, well-thought-out post about myths, but 1) tradition and 2) god of the gaps (essplainin' things the don't understand)

We understand most of the big questions besides the origin of the cosmos, they just don't know that or care about it or are freed up to know it.  And tradition is simply a bad idea on how to keep everything the same.

I'm not talking about the "where did the universe come from" kind of questions. It's not so much a "god of the gaps" discussion. 

It's the inherent fact that humans are just animals. We're social animals, but we're just animals. We're driven by base urges. Jealousy. Hate. Wanting to screw. And those base urges need to be restrained and channeled in order to have a functional society. 

We needed myths in antiquity to explain why the tribal chief deserved to be chief, or later why the king deserved to be king and we should follow him. We need myths today to explain why we should give our income to the taxman. We create myths out of whole cloth involving things like "human rights" or "civil rights" in order to try to make a working society where people feel safe. 

But we're just animals. You may claim you have a right to life, but that claim doesn't mean a thing when someone murders you. It's a myth. At best, because we've built a society around that myth, someone down the road can punish the murderer. But that doesn't protect your "right"; you're dead. 

Think about the Ten Commandments:

• I am the authority and you should have no others: I'm establishing credibility for why you should listen to MY rules and not some other competing set.
• Thou shalt not take my name in vain: speak only highly of me so that others will revere my rules.
• Keep the sabbath holy: show fealty to me such that all around you know that you follow my rules.
• Honor thy father and mother: Everything you're thinking of doing, idiot, your parents have either already tried and have the physical/emotional scars to prove they failed, or were smart enough not to try. Talk to them and maybe they'll help you follow my rules.
• Don't murder people: Well, yeah. Hard to have a society if you have people going around offing each other.
• Don't screw other people's spouses: Yeah, leads to breakup of families, leads to jealousy, and a whole bunch of bad things.
• Don't steal: Well, yeah. Hard to have a society if you are always worried your neighbor is gonna come walk off with your goat.
• Don't lie about others: Well, yeah. Hard to have a society if you don't trust each other to speak truth.
• Don't covet your neighbor's wife: If you're thinking about it, you might break rule #6. So don't think about it or it's almost like you're doing it. 
• Don't covet your neighbor's stuff: If you're thinking about it, you might break rule #7. So don't think about it or it's almost like you're doing it. 

Pretty much "here's why the rules matter (God made 'em), and here are the rules that basically give you a society that doesn't have a bunch of murder, theivery, or men running off with other men's wives--which will probably lead to some murders."

Should we all be able to live in a polite and safe society without that? YES. But it sure was a pretty basic framework to start with, right? 

Show a 100 year graph.
The cliff is more noticeable. 

You said since the Internet 

You said since the Internet

I did.
I guess the cliff includes the people who'd have labeled religion as "somewhat important."  
But your graph only has "very important."
Another incomplete effort.
I'm assuming it's accidental.

Idk, to me, myth means lie.  We don't have to lie in order to feel safe. 

Yeah, I know the word "myth" triggers people. But it's not intended to. Perhaps the better idea would be the word "model". As CD always says, "all models are wrong; some of them are useful."

Religion is a model that is very imperfect, but what we're saying is that in some ways it served humanity well for a long time. I don't believe that we would be the society we are today without centuries of religion leading up to it, even if we perhaps don't need the "God" part now. 

We originally made up a lie about gods to feel safe.  But we no longer need to.  We can have the expectation that people treat each other with decency because it's ethical and what's best for us all.  I don't have a special right to life, but I have as much a right to life as anyone else.  When that is reciprocated, we can progress as a society.  No gods needed.

You act as if "ethics" exist a priori. I'm saying that's false. I would call ethics a myth, but as you consider that synonymous with a lie, it would be better to describe ethics as a model. 

We come up with a model that we try to use to facilitate a good society. That model is, like all models created by man, imperfect. We call that model "ethics". But it's really hard to get people to follow the model without a threat. That threat used to be "eternal damnation". And we replace it with "laws" based on those ethics and "jails" that you can throw people into if they violate it. Another model called the "social/contract".

But why should anyone respect the laws? Well, we construct another model, which we call government. And we say that government makes the laws and can enforce them. And like the model of "ethics", government is another model that is imperfect. Sometimes we elect shitty people. Sometimes they do really bad things. And when they do, all we have to rely on to compel obedience is "well, they're the government." End of story. 

----------

It's all fiction on the veneers of human nature, that only works because we agree it does. Like money. Money is a model. Money works because we all agree it does. But occasionally we don't. Like Weimar Germany, or Zimbabwe, or Brazil. Myths are not inviolate. 

I can respect religion as a model for one reason: it's based on theoretical perfection, and because it's supernatural, it's unfalsifiable. That's pretty damn powerful. Whereas most of our other models are based on empirical imperfection. We can point to government screwing up. We can point to misplaced ethics, like the idea that people were owned as property in the US only ~160 years, and that was not only legal, it was written into the founding document of our government.

But in the end, they're all just stories we tell each other to try to agree on how we should all get along with each other. 

I agree with you that The Golden Rule is a hell of a model for society. But it's just a model. It's not "true" or "false". It's something we tell each other to agree on how we can all get along.