Beyond Belief, Radio 4Night Waves, Radio 3

Myths great and small were discussed by deists and rock refuseniks

Nietzsche was wrong. God's not dead; he's just been having a bit of a kip. Now he's up and about again and bestriding the land in his various guises.

As the Beyond Belief presenter Ernie Rea put it, if you tried to talk about religious programming in the 1980s and 90s, when he was a TV executive, "you were looked at as some sort of freak". Now faith is a burning issue again (though not, these days, at the stake), and BB posed the question: "Is Britain Post-Secular?"

A Jesuit, an atheist and a Muslim were lined up in the studio to discuss it (the Englishman, the Scotsman and the Irishman were stuck in traffic), and they agreed that the rise of Islam in the West has been the driving force behind what the atheist, the philosopher A C Grayling, referred to dismissively as religion "turning up the volume". He believes that God will get put back in his box and that scientific rationalism will prevail. I wish I could be as confident.

There was some muddled thinking on show. "The dominance of the secularisation paradigm has come into question, particularly over the question of the linearity of modernisation," the Jesuit declared. Easy for him to say. If you want to catch up with this edition of BB, by the way, there's no immediate rush. I notice on the iPlayer that it's available "until 12.00am Thursday 1 January 2099". Plenty of time for God to die again.

While we're on the subject of myths that fool too many people too much of the time, the American writer Michael Goldfarb was exercised on Monday's Night Waves by events of 40 years ago. In the superb first of four pieces about the summer of 1969, when he was a student at a liberal arts college in Ohio, he talked about the pop festival all his friends were going to but which he couldn't face. "Three days outside? Camping? Primitive toilet facilities, if any? It didn't appeal." And when they trooped back "in various states of disrepair, mud-splattered, sniffling and glassy-eyed", he felt pretty smug. "It seemed like the all-time catastrophe."

They had, of course, been to Woodstock, that legendary long weekend of peace, love and muck. And almost immediately, he said, "The myth kicked in, created in the underground press first of all, then pushed by the coming entrepreneurs of culture aware of the purchasing power of youth. In real time I watched as the myth of Woodstock nation was created – the counter-cultural mass media reprogrammed the bedraggled festival-goers' memories."

On subsequent evenings, Goldfarb went on to talk about the film Medium Cool ("the one American film that gets the Sixties"), the Manson killings and the moon landing – which some people believe also to be a myth. But that's another story.