I've noticed that about you. 😸 But seriously, I gave that up as well - which is perhaps why we get along (at least some of the time.) The problem with only improving yourself and not advocating for change that affects others as well, is that you alone are not enough to improve the world. It's a very important part, but it's not enough.

A concrete example of this is the pervasive issue with rape and sexual harassment in the military. There are many, many military men who never rape or harass anyone and who don't condone that behavior either. Across the forces, they have upped both the training and the punishments for doing so in recent years, but it's done absolutely nothing to change the numbers - which are staggering. By the Pentagon's own estimate 39 men are raped every day service-wide - and that's just the men. Something like 25% of women are raped and 80% are harassed. The reason that nothing has changed is that the military is a dominance-based hierarchy in spades and until they decide to address the ways that these leads to all sorts of abuse, including sexual abuse, nothing is going to change. Whatever percentage of men who never engage in that does nothing whatsoever to improve the over all dynamic and the conditions that so many face on a regular basis.

This is, of course, true culture wide and 50 years of sexual harassment training and anti-racism training have made only the smallest dent in the problems because they aren't looking at and addressing the underlying issues of a culture built around a dominance hierarchy. Some of that stuff is conscious and malicious but a lot of it is simply acting out the subconscious scripts of the social system. The only way to truly impact it for the better is to at least notice the dynamics that are actually in play even if you can't completely overhaul the system. It's my assertion that if more people understood the dynamics, and saw them for what they are, that's when improvements can be made. Your personal subconscious cannot help but be influenced by the culture around you and the subconscious world of the collective.

My maternal grandmother was a staunch Baptist but also a schoolteacher. She saw no inherent disconnect between "God" and science - considering them to essentially be one and the same, so I grew up with that as a foundational belief as well. I do think that mythology often presents stories that explain things in the world so that they are more accessible to the populace at large. They are also sometimes used to justify cultural shifts -as mentioned before about the sacred animal of the Queen of Heaven suddenly become the agent of the devil in the Garden of Eden story. In addition, in ancient Summeria, Marduk murders his mother Tiamat (the primeval feminine) so as to bring order to the cosmos just about the time that patriarchal norms were beginning to arise in the area. The myth justifies what is going on in the world around them.