Just after we got back from a skiing break in Annecy, a religious friend, presumably in an attempt to win me back to the faith, told me that her equally religious daughter had gone out for a long weekend with friends to the ski slopes in France, only to find that they were shrouded in cloud. After two days of this, time was running out and the daughter said to her friends, "What do think we should do?". To which the reply was: "What can we do?". The daughter said, "Well we could pray for the weather to clear up". She did and it did - for the remaining hours of their stay! The daughter used to be the leader of a sales team for a large company and somehow I can just hear her telling God that he had failed to meet his target for sunshine upon the righteous. Now of course the previous week, when we had gone up Mount Semnoz to ski, we too had found that our heads were in a cloud. We could barely see where we were and the weather forecasts were not looking good. As you may guess, I did not pray for better weather and neither so far as I know did Heather. Somehow, though, for the next three days that was precisely what we had. Bright sunshine and beautiful snow.

If I were still religious and had prayed, then I might have believed such glorious weather to be an answer to prayer. Or perhaps not, because my experience of prayer for good weather for church outings when I was young was that the result was about as reliable as the long-term weather forecast, despite the amount of faith displayed by our leaders. In fact, in my church, we gave up on the concept altogether. I'm not sure that we had in mind the chaos theory idea that the beating of a butterfly's wings here might cause a hurricane on the other side of the world, but we came to the conclusion that it was selfish to ask for any particular sort of weather for ourselves, when it might be exactly the opposite of what someone-else needed. We decided that must be why God ignored our requests for sunshine. And so we took our macks instead.

There are, however, large sections of the evangelical wing of the Church in America, particularly, which believe not just in God the weatherman, but in God the Capitalist - a God who has promised believers all sorts of good things, both spiritual and material. All they need to do is, in the jargon, claim the promises of God'. It is the Harry Potter version of Christianity - one where all you have to do is say the right incantation, waive your wand and behold, you get what you want, be it money or health! In the febrile atmosphere of such churches, any apparent example of the working of such promises is acclaimed as confirmation of God's faithfulness to his people. They tithe their money to their churches knowing that if they have faith in their God in his new role as investment manager, then he will give them what they ask for - the bread they cast upon the waters will be returned to them - one of those promises. If they are not successful, then it is down to their lack of faith. And the Churches have malls instead of bookshops.

Amongst the superstitious generally, the events in their lives which accord with their superstition are made a lot of - the others are largely ignored. They are put down to a failure to use the correct make of frogs leg or eye of newt when carrying out the incantation. The Boxer Uprising in China of 1900 against modernism and Christianity was a good example of this way of thinking, as "In Our Time" reminded us the other week. The Chinese peasants belonging to this martial-arts based religion believed that through training, martial arts, diet and prayer, they could perform extraordinary feats, such as flight, and would be immune to swords and bullets. They went into battle against the government troops believing that they were invincible. When they were shot and killed, defects in their religious ceremonies prior to the battle, or the presence of "unclean" women during those ceremonies, would be blamed for their vulnerability.

But it is not just the churches or the superstitious. The American investment fund boss, Bernard Madoff, relied on a similar mentality - the wish to believe. He became the incarnation of God the Investment Manager, conferring upon his carefully chosen people a return on their investment at a rate which was seemingly impossible. And of course it was. He used the money of new investors to pay the promised returns to the established investors - not forgetting to take a substantial cut for himself along the way. He helped his marks to convince themselves that, just like the Boxers and the Harry Potter wing of the church, they were immune to reality. People persist in failing to understand that if something looks too good to be true then it almost certainly is. Of course, because his fraud could clearly be proved, Mr Madoff will end his days in gaol. Not so, however, the many other purveyors of false hope who wriggle and twist and tell us that all we had to do to avoid disaster was put another wing of bat in the cauldron.