Sceptics can take this comfort: they now make up the biggest denomination, followed by Catholics and then Anglicans. But this puts Australia only about midway in a list of the top 50 non-believing nations.

All the same, we’re getting there. Agnostics and atheists together = 30%, a figure that in my youth would have astonished my parents’ generation – and delighted my father.

63%, however, believe in miracles, a large increase over earlier surveys. I would guess that global threats like planetary warming, the energy crisis and terrorism would partly account for that. But the Vatican as ever is busy fanning the flames. This week Australia acquired its first bona fide saint and miracle-worker, Mary McKillop.

Her second and clinching ‘miracle’ was to cure a woman’s ‘incurable’ cancer from beyond the grave. The woman prayed to Mary McKillop; the cancer went into remission; ergo, according to the Vatican, a miracle. But spontaneous remission from cancer is well-documented (Anthony Campbell discusses the literature.) How is it possible to demonstrate that only supernatural intervention is the cause? Theology, that’s how.

There are (secular) saints. Raymond Gaita has an excellent account of how, when we meet some people, there is no other or better word for the qualities we perceive in them. And as my late friend Lizzie liked to aver, martyrs are made every day.  Young people confront tanks in Tianamen Square or the Revolutionary Guard in Teheran ; if their deaths advance the cause of justice by inspiring others to work for it, then ‘martyr’ fits. If not, they remain victims. It’s not a question of their inner purity, nor need it be adjudged by a panel of geriatric celibates. It’s whether or not others with similar convictions put in the work.

Rather than throw out the whole apparatus of Christianity, I always want to reclaim what is useable – which makes me one of those ‘cultural Christians’ David Marr talks about in the article linked earlier.  I guess the Theses on Feuerbach are still working away somewhere.

On a similar theme, have a look at Ben Goldacre’s (much better) piece on diarrhea and AIDS.