Books that question the existence of God are the top sellers these days. Ahhh a return to sanity!

Struggling authors should keep the faith - literally. Sales of books that explore religion or spirituality have grown by more than 50 per cent in the past three years, according to online retailer Amazon.

But the statistics may not make uplifting reading for believers. The most popular 'religious' book, says Amazon, is The God Delusion, an anti-faith polemic by Richard Dawkins, the academic who has been dubbed 'Darwin's rottweiler'. Second is God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, another broadside at holy citadels, by the journalist Christopher Hitchens.

It never fails. If you look back through history you will find that rampant religiosity is always followed by a return to secularism. You may have heard of a little thing called the Renaissance.

So we may soon see an end to the ridiculous popularity of the "Left Behind" books and that moron from the "Growing Pains". But before you start dancing naked in the streets and having recreational sex while devouring recreational drugs, you might be interested to know that our trip to bacchanalia will probably be followed by another return to puritan values and fundamentalist hate-mongering.

But perhaps someday, long after I shuffled off of this mortal coil, human beings will finally abandon our religious security blankets and finally understand that all religions are a creation of mortal minds and may have served an important purpose in the past but that we have finally evolved past the need for simple poorly written morality fables to make us behave ourselves.