Hope Is What You Have Before You Do Your Research.

[Chessie]

I thought of this today. Funniest thing.

I was contemplating the nature of hope in people. I wanted to know why people continually put money into the lottery and why they vote and why they put faith in creations like gods. The primary lead into each of these ideas is 'hope'. Not faith. Faith, insofar as I can tell, is willfully not looking at what's around you. Hope is something else entirely.

Hope, so it seems, is not knowing what's around you. This is not to say good things don't happen in this world seemingly spontaneously but if they happen, it's always cause and effect of some kind. Hope is the word people give to the idea that good things will happen to them and they won't know how or why.

This isn't to say the emotion isn't positive, but it is an illusion. If you look at a situation wherein you have a quantity of food and a population to feed then you can say 'I hope we have enough to feed everyone!' and get some benefit from the sensation.

However, if you have 10000 calories worth of food and 100 people to feed, hope evaporates. You know, with certainty, you cannot feed them all adequately. People are entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts.

Faith and Hope operate along more or less the same lines. Once you have died, your research will be complete on the existence of other lives and you won't need to 'hope' for an afterlife anymore.

I feel very strongly that persons who believe in the terrifyingly long list of 'magical events' and 'abilities' and 'possibilities' where they give up on cause and effect and label things as 'acts of Faith' or 'God' or 'it happened because I kept up hope' are missing a far greater miracle.

The world we know and civilization as it operates now happens because people assert their individual and collective wills to make things happen. We do our research and don't hope for the intervention of divinity. Stop hoping. Hope is not what will make your life worthwhile. A man could spend his entire life in a garden seeking the perfect cherry blossom and not consider it a life wasted...but a man who spends every day hoping instead of seeking is a wastrel, empty, and looking for a river of lies to be filled with.

 

[Faye]

You can still know what is going on and wish that it is not going to happen; you can hope for the best even if you think it isn't the most likely thing.

I would say that is different from faith, especially blind faith, but faith isn't necessarily a bad thing. The two might overlap, so I think you're right to some extent, but I don't think hope is limited to faith.

And,

Never deprive someone of hope; it might be all they have.

 

[bagelriffic]

Hope, so it seems, is not knowing what's around you. This is not to say good things don't happen in this world seemingly spontaneously but if they happen, it's always cause and effect of some kind. Hope is the word people give to the idea that good things will happen to them and they won't know how or why.

yeah i think this is spot on, and well done with the differentiations between faith/hope, couldn't agree more. with that said i wouldn't want to discourage people from having hope when they're circumstances prevent an adequate source of knowledge and understanding, sometimes its all one has, but if hope is something we rely for the majority of our decisions and dilemmas, this explanation might give clarity to why.

 

[invisible]

i wonder how many individuals who are historically remembered as "great" were motivated by the hope that if they worked hard enough they might achieve something meaningful.

 

[Trifoilum]

I agreed with your words to some degrees (and let this be said; it's a lot in information and definitions), but your preposition (stop hoping) has an implicit assumption that all hope entails is sitting around waiting for something to happen; being passive.

While I would say not all hopeful people are passive / waiting; the worst of them were.
But hope is not bad. Nor is hope useless, distracting, or an illusion that has to be banished from the hearts of all people. To me, hope is also the basis of optimism, of the knowledge that even if something isn't very good today, tomorrow it will. And the day after tomorrow. And other days. It's best done as a decoration; the kind of embroideries that distinguished great fabrics from mediocre ones, the instruments playing in the background that enriches a music; for to fill someone's heart entirely with hope without action is just like every other feelings in existence; it goes bad and rotten inside.
But depriving them of hope would leave them with nothing. No, it's not clarity, but plain old, bitter, damaging cynicism.

For voting, I think it's not that people simply 'hope' but do it or not, those people WILL raise up to work. I think voting is a proactive action, albeit perhaps not the best. If I have to put a word, it's 'dependence'.

I think it's not that people should stop hoping, but people should start working on their hope more.

 

[Barnabas]

Your life must seem terrible if you're trying to live without hope.

 

[randomsomeone]

There are many perspectives one could take on something like hope. The pragmatic approach is one, but I always gravitate in things like this towards something more complex. I tend to be quite comfortable with things beyond my immediate ability to research and draw concrete conclusions about. It is enough for me to observe the current and to row in that direction rather than against, to truly participate (inasmuch as I can) in something beyond my own finiteness.

 

[Trifoilum]

A greater hope is to hope* even after your hope's been proven wrong.
Something that's in my mind some time ago.

*) To some degree. And more in the sense of 'tomorrow is another day' rather than 'I shall keep hoping for the impossible to happen, maybe it will happen!"

 

[Prometheus]

Hope has always been an interesting concept to me. The concept of Hope from the story of Pandora's box is normally taken for granted as a good thing but, when you think about it, it was together with the multitude of evils that were released. So is it good to retain hope because hope empowers or because hope is one less evil to face? And if hope empowers, then does that mean that all worldly evils act like a vaccine, strengthening the body to its own kind by being taken inside?

I think you're oversimplifying the concept of Hope as though all people are simply sitting back on their laurels, waiting for their God to drop the winning ticket in their lap. I, for one, have great hope that, if I accomplish my life goals, I can set the wheels in motion to correct all that is wrong with this country and, by extension, a sizable chunk of the world we influence. Whether or not I think I will actually accomplish this is another thing, but I hope, damn it, and I won't die without trying.

It's one thing to hope that chance will favor you out of the blue and another thing to hope that your actions will not be unnecessary.

 

[Jack]

Imho people have the most screwed up definitions of faith. Faith is just trust in something or someone, like you trust a spouse, or a friend. It isn't a fancy term for being stupid.