Okay, Del, enough persiflage! You deserve to get a proper response to your original post on God & sewage systems.
First of all, I personally find your picture of Enlightenment vs. Superstition rather quaint, 18th-centuryish.
Your first sentence is characteristic:
How about, instead of praying futilely to a non-existent god for a cure for disease we search for new antibiotics and build quality sewage systems.
Well, the church-goers I know may pray to God for a cure for their diseases. But they don't really expect Him to produce one. They expect the scientific community to do that. They go to the doctor. They surf the net to get news about the latest antibiotics and innovative therapies. They use filters to purify their drinking water. And so forth.
Secondly, I was not really joking about sewage system engineers who go to church. It is quite possible to combine an "enlightened" activity (e.g., science) with the practice of superstition (e.g., prayer). I personally have met many devout engineers. That used to puzzle me.
For example, I remember one such engineer who was convinced that the Second Coming was imminent, and loved to expatiate on just what awaited us all. I was bemused, and said to myself: "Here is a guy who follows scientific method and exercises critical judgment on the job all day. Then he goes home, parks his scientifically trained mind at the door, suspends his critical faculty entirely, and switches into an almost medieval mode of thinking. Is his brain completely split into two non-communicating parts: the right lobe for science, the left lobe for religion?"
After a while, however, I got used to this apparent contradiction, because I saw many more cases of it (although none quite so extreme as this one). By the way, they were all perfectly "normal" people.
The only conclusion I can draw from this is a tentative one. And that is that engineering may be a useful and satisfying profession, but does not necessarily do much for The Soul.
As I said before, Man does not live by sewage systems alone...
jbe
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