... and hope.
Note the lack of hope among so many skeptics. Start talking to them about the future and you quickly discover that not only is life meaningless and success essentially random, but human civilization is doomed to extinction due to ecological overshoot soon so who cares...
This lack of hope can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. It causes people to disengage and stop investing in the future.
It's nice. It's hopeful. It makes sense.
Another thing about secularism that bothers me (and I am not religious) is the strong negative association with birth rates. Look up the statistics. The more rational your worldview is the less you reproduce, to the point that most very secular nations are in demographic decline. Difficult investments in the future such as child rearing seem to be replaced by an evolutionary dead end Epicurean lifestyle.
I'm not arguing that everyone should join the Quiverfull movement, but it bothers me that fertility is inversely correlated to a rational worldview. Darwin is clearly on the side of fanaticism and superstition, in that if there is any genetic basis to these traits we are strongly selecting for them. Even if there is no genetic basis, beliefs propagate most strongly from parent to child so we are certainly culturally selecting for fanatical religious ideologies in the long term. A higher proportion of tomorrow's children will be the product of today's fundamentalists. I suspect this is why severe religious ideologies are historically so powerful. Those that didn't hold them left fewer descendants.
I see a connection there -- between deep pessimism and lack of fertility -- that points to some kind of psychological vacuum related to motivation and hope. Seems like when you take away myth, you take away teleological action. Actions belong to the realm of narrative -- storytelling -- not fact. This is as true in the secular realm as in the religious -- progress is a myth, not a fact. In the extreme it takes on a quasi-religious tone in the form of "the Singularity" and similar ideas. Even companies have myths, and startup founders often have to put on at least a little bit of a guru hat.
You also seem to take away the idea that one can stand up against overpowering adversity. It's certainly true that humanity faces difficult challenges, but those who have secular worldviews seem to easily default to hopelessness the minute their logical analysis turns up a probability of success that seems less than 50/50. Perhaps there's something adaptive about the craziness of faith... it causes us to actually try in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity.
I think you have some deeply rooted misunderstandings about the relationship between religion and fertility. Religious people have more kids primarily because most organized religions frown upon birth control. It has nothing to do with hope or optimism and everything to do with the fact that they are having sex just as often as non-religious folks but are much more likely to conceive. Another reason is that non-religious people tend to be more independent in their thinking and they question and resist social pressures -- and even economic incentives -- to have kids. Atheist couples are much more open to sitting down and having a conversation about whether they want kids and, if they do, whether they are ready.
As for religion and evolution... I don't even know where to begin. Just because you're popping out child after child doesn't mean those children are likely to survive, prosper and reproduce. That is traditionally why people have felt the need to have lots of kids: you didn't know how many of them would live long enough to have kids of their own. It is only very recently that modern medicine has significantly decreased child mortality and increased lifespans. This is yet another reason why developed countries have lower birth rates.
The bottom line is that your entire narrative seems to be that lack of religion leads to pessimism, which then leads to lower fertility, and this is somehow going to have evolutionary implications. To anyone who is knowledgeable about any of these topics, this is just sheer, unadulterated nonsense.
It has been demonstrated repeatedly that higher education is correlated with lower birth rates, all the way down to sub-replacement levels. This is indeed a problem for anyone who wants to promote secular policies in a democracy, if they quickly find themselves outnumbered in a few generations (assuming that "conversion" to secular politics happens at a lower rate than the non-secular birth rate). That is how I read the parent comment.
Also, its probably not in our best interest to pretend that extinction events don't happen. If anything, if we're seeing some paranoia, it might be healthy paranoia. Imagine if Al Gore was a "everything happens for a reason" type person and didn't care to invest his political life into the environment. Instead he fought to popularize global warming and has helped moved policy forward. Policy that will probably make a difference to our grandkids. There's a lot of middle ground between the optimism of 72 virgins and the strawman doom-and-gloom person you describe.
The most hopeless people I know tend to be conservative religious types for whatever reason. "Get while the gettings good" seems to be their collective motto. Who cares about the future when Jesus/Buddha/whoever is coming back any day now!
I always noticed that at academic conferences the casual greeting seemed to be agreement about the impending human die-off due to global warming / ecological doom / whatever.
I think you see the pessimists on both sides of the secular / religious divide. The difference is that pessimism is generally low-status and frowned upon in secular groups, meaning that pessimists in those groups are generally not very vocal about their pessimism.