literature

I already linked rationalwiki eschatology, of which millenialism, subsection secular iterations.

Chistine Hayes
here, in particular lectures 15 - 19.

She and Dale Martin are quite the pairing for those who'd rather not get into the weeds of ecumenical "faith" or prefer to climb out of them.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Vagaries of Fashion: Abrahamic Faiths and Law

Bernal laid out as never before the historicizing, totalizing authority of european scholarship --especially among "classicists" who rejected "Ancient Model" historiography in order to define "Aryan" models of world history, humanity, civilization, and valid scientific, or empirical, "positivism" serving concomitant polemic serving divine and darwinian hierarchy of "races". Bernal does this by cross-examining three centuries of canonical literature and tuition sponsored by "gatekeepers" anchored to "Greek civilization". The other two volumes employ historical linguistic technique to translate archaeological materials and critique ethnographic syllabaries, cognates, and 'industry' persisting to this day. Now, note: Bernal's investigation does not reject out of hand all prior art. That's not his purpose; It is to restore "multicultural" material and authority to the body of knowledge of "humanity" which should be available to students.

Panic
The authors of this curiously titled essay "Tropical Depression" posit the ethical crisis, Who is disturbed by all manner of crises which "climate change" represents?
That depends, I suppose, on who has the time to investigate the "special case" --the parable-- of Pateh Sabally

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

If we have a chance to survive, and we don't try it, we won't survive. Or at least it's likely to depress the chance.

Embracing optimism, it's the logical choice.

What sprang immediately to my mind upon reading this article in the context of our ongoing conversation was Ernst Becker's The Denial of Death. (Full length PDF) Following is an excerpt from the foreword by Sam Keen:

In the years since his death, Becker has been widely recognized as one of the great spiritual cartographers of our age and a wise physician of the soul. Gradually, reluctantly, we are beginning to acknowledge that the bitter medicine he prescribes -- contemplation of the horror of our inevitable death -- is, paradoxically, the tincture that adds sweetness to mortality.

Becker's philosophy as it emerges in Denial of Death and Escape from Evil is a braid woven from four strands.

The first strand. The world is terrifying. To say the least, Becker's account of nature has little in common with Walt Disney. Mother Nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates. We live, he says, in a creation in which the routine activity for organisms is "tearing others apart with teeth of all types -- biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue."

The second strand. The basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death. Human beings are naturally anxious because we are ultimately helpless and abandoned in a world where we are fated to die. "This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression -- and with all this yet to die."

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and Ernest Becker were strange allies in fomenting the cultural revolution that brought death and dying out of the closet. At the same  time that Kubler-Ross gave us permission to practice the art of dying gracefully, Becker taught us that awe, fear, and ontological anxiety were natural accompaniments to our contemplation of the fact of death.

The third strand. Since the terror of death is so overwhelming we conspire to keep it unconscious. "The vital lie of character" is the first line of defense that protects us from the painful awareness of our helplessness. Every child borrows power from adults and creates a personality by introjecting the qualities of the godlike being. If I am like my all-powerful father I will not die. So long as we stay obediently within the defense mechanisms of our personality, what Wilhelm  Reich called "character armor" we feel safe and are able to pretend that the world is manageable. But the price we pay is high. We repress our bodies to purchase a soul that time cannot destroy; we sacrifice pleasure to buy immortality; we encapsulate ourselves to avoid death. And life escapes us while we huddle within the
defended fortress of character.

Society provides the second line of defense against our natural impotence by creating a hero system that allows us to believe that we transcend death by participating in something of lasting worth. We achieve ersatz immortality by sacrificing ourselves to conquer an empire, to build a temple, to write a book, to establish a family, to accumulate a fortune, to further progress and prosperity, to create an information-society and global free market. Since the main task of human life is to become heroic and transcend death, every culture must provide its members with an intricate symbolic system that is covertly religious. This means that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects, holy wars.

One of Becker's lasting contributions to social psychology has been to help us understand that corporations and nations may be driven by unconscious motives that have little to do with their stated goals. Making a killing in business or on the battlefield frequently has less to do with economic need or political reality than with the need for assuring ourselves that we have achieved something of lasting worth.