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Every generation of people think that their problems are the most important ever. As history flows without interruption and doomsday scenarios fail, the following generations focus on their own contemporary events, ignoring or underestimating the past. In this way people always see "signs" in their times and the end of the world is constantly a fresh subject.

A History of the Apocalypse

Religion. For thousands of years this thing has dictated which people should live and which people should die, what shape our buildings should have or what colors our garments should contain, what food people should eat or what words people should speak. If religion is the opium of the masses, then beliefs about the end of the world are like overdoses. People touched by such beliefs no longer rely on a hidden, personal and intimate god, contemplated upon from the safe distance of the beating human heart. They live with the promise of divine intervention at a grand scale on the current coordinates of space and time. This can be an exceptional motivator and a game changer in terms of civil obedience, both at an individual and collective level. In the name of an immediate and palpable deity people can commit shocking cruelties. However, such belief can also account for some of the most exceptional social developments in human history.

In every belief system spiritual entities have been labeled as good if they have acted in favor to people and as evil if they have threatened their existence. Furthermore, protective actions and dangerous actions have been classified as such based on the beholder’s level of understanding of order and chaos. Evil entities spread chaos that endangers people’s existence, while good entities create order that preserves human life.

On Ardent Topics Of Our Time

Religious Thoughts

If religion is the opium of the masses, then the beliefs about the end of the world are overdoses. The belief in the imminent end of the world is one of the most powerful and radical motivations of the human psyche. It is the overspill of adrenaline of the religious beliefs that combines urgent passions with deep megalomaniac tendencies. Fatalistic beliefs have the ability to generate incredible powers by setting into motion large masses of people and converting their feelings into a collective force. People caught in this kind of phenomena are capable of out of the ordinary things; they can...

History of the Apocalypse

Florin Pop

Marta Chinnici

"Many applications generate large datasets, like social networking and social influence programs, smart cities applications, smart house environments, Cloud applications, public web sites, scientific experiments and simulations, data warehouse, monitoring platforms, and e-government services. This book will primarily encompass practical approaches that advance research in all aspects of data processing, data analytics, data processing in Cloud/Edge/Fog systems, having a large variety of tools and software to manage them. The book focuses on focuses on topics covering algorithms, architectures, management models, high performance computing techniques and large-scale distributed systems"--

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