Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters

by Timothy J. Keller

C. E. M. Joad was a leading British agnostic philosopher who turned back to Christianity after World War II. In his book The Recovery of Belief he wrote: The view of evil implied by Marxism, expressed by Shaw and maintained by modern psychotherapy, a view which regards evil as the by-product of circumstances, which circumstances can, therefore, alter and even eliminate, has come to seem [in light of World War II and atrocities by both Nazis and Stalinists] intolerably shallow. . . . It was because we rejected the doctrine of original sin that we on the Left were always being disappointed, disappointed . . . by the failure of true socialism to arrive, by the behavior of nations and politicians . . . above all, by the recurrent fact of war.73 One of the key volumes that came out of this time was a book by several disillusioned communists and socialists, including Arthur Koestler and André Gide, entitled The God that Failed.74 The title says it all, describing how a political ideology can make absolute promises and demand total life commitment.