Growing up conservatively in this predominantly Roman Catholic country entails memories of attending a Catholic school where you line up outside the classroom to get ash whenever it’s Ash Wednesday, hearing mass every first Friday, going to compulsory confession every now and then, and going on annual recollections and retreats out of town. It also means being indocrinated in a lot if straight-jacket like traditions and perceptions of sexuality and birth control and impositions that if you don’t talk to your creator a certain way, it will spell the difference between heaven and hell for your afterlife.

There was a time when the religious amongst us condemned technology and the internet as an instrument of evil---an affront to everything that is pure, good and holy…and that it can never be one way for anyone to establish a long and lasting connection with your eternal spirit.

The Sydney-based founder of a trend-spotting site, thecoolhunter.net, begs to differ. They launched dear-god.net - a website where people all over the world or at least those with internet access, can post their prayers to "Jesus, Allah, Buddha, or simply their preferred spiritual universal energy". The prayers that land in God’s inbox range from issues of confusion, depression, grief and abortion to politics, homosexuality and faith. Then there are the humorous ones, like this one from somebody in Australia who wrote:

Madonna is stalking me. I lost my virginity to ‘Like A Virgin’ in the back of my boyfriends pick up truck at 16, and six weeks later I had to tell my Italian father that I was pregnant whilst MTV was blaring ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ in the background. At 18, I lost my faith in religion about the same time Madonna was burning crucifixes, and tried to recreate the sentiment by putting my rosary beads in the microwave. It lacked the drama and ruined my mum’s microwave. At 22, I got lost for two days in the snow whilst on a skiing holiday and the only thing that kept me alive was playing ‘Frozen’ on repeat whilst hypothermia set in. Finally, last night my new boyfriend and I had sex for the first time, whilst Madonna’s ‘4 Minutes ‘ played on the radio. He came in just under 3 and a half. I know she is in my life for a reason, I am just not sure why. Please send me a sign, preferably before her next single is released."

Dear-god.net is the latest in a string of websites and technologies - such as podcasts of sermons you can download to your iPod and daily verses sent by SMS thanks to your favoured mobile operator, enabling young people to connect with God in the same way they might communicate with their friends or family. The site allows people to get in touch with God (or at least the impression that it really is the Alpha and Omega) without robes, rosary beads, and novena booklets but with a virtual confessional. Well, it’s better than having to face the priest who may know the rest of your family and spilling to him the evil deeds you’ve been doing lately.

Hot on the tracks of technology, the Catholic Church also launched a cyber-riffic site called faithtrip.net - a Facebook of sorts for the converted and young people "searching for answers". The social-networking site is packed with religious-themed blogs, chatrooms, forums and webcasts and was created by Church Resources, a not-for-profit group formed eight years ago by Catholic bishops to foster new telecommunications for churches in the digital age. It serves as a venue where young people can share their teenage or mature problems and mind-boggling questions without other people telling them it’s the most stupid thing they’ve ever heard.

Eventually even the Vatican had to set up its own website lending credence to the oft-quoted line, "if you cant beat them, join them." That being the case, have you confessed? Holiness is most likely just a click away