Great posts, both of you.
Historian Paul Johnson, in Modern Times laid it out pretty well:
Of the trio of great German imaginative scholars who offer explanations of human behavior in the nineteenth century, and whose corpus of thought the post-1918 world inherited, only two so far have been mentioned. Marx described a world in which the central dynamic was economic interest. To Freud, the principal thrust was sexual. Both assumed that religion, the old impulse that moved men and masses, was a fantasy and always had been. Friedrich Nietzsche, the third of the trio, was also an atheist. But he saw God not as an invention, but as a casualty, and His demise as in some important sense an historical event which would have dramatic consequences. He wrote in 1886: "The greatest event in in recent times - that 'God is Dead,' that the belief in the Christian God is no longer tenable - is beginning to cast its first shadows upon Europe." Among the advanced races, the decline and ultimately the collapse of the religious impulse would leave a huge vacuum. The history of modern times is in great part the history how that vacuum came to be filled. Nietzsche rightly perceived that the most likely candidate would be what he called the 'Will to Power,' which offered a far more comprehensive and in the end more plausible explanation of human behavior than Marx or Freud. In place of religious belief, there would be secular ideology. Those who had once filled the ranks of the totalitarian clergy would become totalitarian politicians. And above all the Will to Power would produce a new kind of messiah, uninhibited by any religious sanctions whatsoever, and with an unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind."
And the new messiah today is...