In God we trust. All others use pay-pal.

The e-business selling worship to the Hindu pantheon of Gods went into high gear this month with the advent of Diwali or the festival of Lights.

Thousands of Indians living abroad are logging on to religious Web sites in the run-up to the main Hindu festival of Diwali, courtesy of a stream of portals offering such services as online praying and blessings.

Oct. 21 marks the beginning of the five-day Hindu festival of lights, and some of the millions of Indians living in countries such as Britain, the United States and Canada are electronically joining in the celebrations back home.

For prices ranging from $10 to $15, religious portals are offering prayer sessions for tech-savvy devotees at temples in India, sending them a DVD of the prayer and offerings such as dried flowers or vermilion, blessed by a priest.

Worshipers can also pick up idols, incense sticks and religious books from these holy Web malls, all at the click of a mouse.

The 250-year-old Siddhivinayak temple in central Mumbai is dedicated to the elephant-headed god. Three years ago, it became the first Indian place of worship to go online and has now tied up with ICICI bank to enable devotees to pay online for pujas (prayer rituals).

"All the customer has to do is fill the form stating the puja he wants, and the bank will transfer the specified amount from his account to the Siddhivinayak temple's account," says Anshu Kapoor, executive, ICICI bank, who is overseeing the venture. The prasad (offering blessed by god) will be couriered to devotees after the puja is completed.

The trustees of the temple say the facility will allow devotees living in places other than Mumbai to request pujas and petition the Lord. "The website of the temple, www.siddhivinayak.org, is evolving into a horizontal portal that offers a number of facilities to devotees," says Ashok Nadkarni, a trustee of the temple who helped develop the website. It now offers a wide range of products, like electronic greeting cards and devotional audiocassettes.

Direct deposit devotions abound on the Internet these days.

For instance, Shraddhanjalim markets "rituals without leaving your home," with your choice of deities, Ashram Online offers Flash presentations of pujas to your choice of 15 gods while Saranam.com offers a selection of pujas from several hundred temples.

The number "of people registering online for puja [prayer] during this festival season has surged almost three to four times from the normal days," said Mervyn Jose of Saranam, an India-based site, http://www.saranam.com/.

About 60 percent of Saranam's clients are living overseas, the majority of whom are Indian information technology professionals in their thirties, who are too busy or too distant to get to a temple.

"It is technology which is enabling us to reach the Gods at the click of a mouse," says Jose, a former engineer.

But despite most major temples and religious organizations having their own Web sites, many are not happy with the modern version of worshipping God.

"Though priests perform pujas for our clients, they are not all happy doing it, even the temple authorities and trusts are not very encouraging," says Jose, who offers clients a list of about 150 temples across India to do their prayer sessions.

However, some priests are sympathetic to the new breed of devotees.

"Time is changing and so are devotees, they don't have so much time and they live very far," said Gopal Pujari, a priest at the revered Vaishno Devi shrine in India's northern state of Jammu and Kashmir. "But they have devotion in heart and despite all the constraints; they still remember God in any which way they can."