September 11 2001 was not the first time in the year we had been given graphic demonstrations of the power of faith. In New Zealand we had already seen Korean evangelicals presume to bring a corpse back to life; a woman who died during one of their own exorcisms. Then we saw Baptists in Rawene dissuade a man from seeking medical advice, so strong was their faith that they could heal his sick mind by prayer. He went on to murder three people, two of them his own children. Then we saw the Muslim group in Auckland slash at a man's stomach in order to demonstrate that he could then be healed by prayers. The man ended in up hospital with critical wounds to his stomach.

As if these weren't enough we had repeated instances in Israel of suicide bombers killing scores of innocent people, confident in their faith of a martyr's reward in heaven. And in Ireland, the faith of Protestants was strong enough to allow them to feel justified in shouting threats, abuse, and directing a pipe bomb at young Catholic girls on their way to school.

But all these paled into insignificance when a series of fanatics hijacked four planes and three of them successfully slammed into their prearranged targets, making for a death toll that, at the time of writing, approaches six thousand people. Not only had there been a disastrous failure in intelligence, but, if the more excitable evangelists are to be taken seriously, then the omniscient God had also been caught napping. It is a staple of American fundamentalism that God keeps a special eye out for his chosen people. But God took his eye off the ball, disaster struck, and everyone rushed to thank him! We were then regaled with stories about people 's faith in God helping them get through the crisis. Religious websites have had unprecedented levels of interest since Terrorist Tuesday.

The incongruity of this seems staggering and verging on the unhinged. When the images to conjure with are benign ones, religious people wax lyrical about the life-changing power of faith. It is far more powerful than shallow and cold reason, we are told, their hearts beating with indignation and tears welling with pride. But in times such as this, one finds they are back-pedalling furiously. All of a sudden the power of faith is transferred to other hands. This is 90% politics and only 10% religion, one newspaper assured us. All efforts are made to absolve faith of this appalling crime.

Faith is life-changing, but only in the saccharined, cutey-pie ways, never so as to give people the reason to die, taking as many others with them as possible.

All the inducements to a martyr's death are forgotten and jihad is explained away as some sort of existential commitment, like giving up smoking. This is done by comfortable academics, safe in suburban homes with double-garages and well-stocked wine cellars. But in the slums of Gaza, the camps on the Pakistan-Afghan border, and among the Muslim north of Nigeria, to name only a few places, the understandings are far more literal. The reward for his martyr's death is an eternity of paradise, with a bevy of dark-eyed houris to minister to his every need, boys fair as virgin pearls, and all the delights of the table.

The terrorists did not fly into their targets for some political injustice, real though many of them are. They did what they did because they believed the Muslim prescription to sow terror into the hearts of the infidel. And the American revenge, the nauseatingly-titled operation 'Enduring Freedom' is motivated by similarly ignoble beliefs. Christianity has had a long history of people like these terrorists, but has now grown soft and rendered all the nasty bits as allegorical. But among the American religious right the spirit of fanaticism survives in the dangerous jingoism, so often spiced with religious imagery which so many non-American westerners find so alarming.

The only positive thing faith did during this tragedy was to console thousands of grieving people. But even then, didn't some of them stop to ask, even once, why they were giving thanks to this god? Didn't they want, even if only briefly, to spit anger and defiance at such a vicious, callous divinity; one that - yet again - has shown such extraordinary indifference to those who adore his name? If it is an understandable reaction to thank god for having survived such a disaster, what could possibly have justified this god not showing similar vigilance with regard to all those who lost their lives? Is anyone seriously going to claim that all the victims somehow deserved their fate? Of course not. Most of the clerics were reduced to the impotent plea that it is one of those mysteries, but we thank god anyway. They seemed satisfied by asking, eyes moistened "Why, oh God, why?" We can take Hans Küng as an example of the standard sort of answer theologians could be expected to provide. Küng wrote 'God's love does not protect me from all suffering. But it protects me in all suffering.' It is difficult to imagine who could find this sort of sophistry any sort of consolation. But really, what else could they say?