Comment of the Week: Hope & Faith
I see hope, especially a reliance upon hope, as useless. Is it not just a self-centered wish that things be as I want them? The universe is not paying attention to what I want. As long as I hope, I'm not paying attention to the reality of now.
Hope is like faith. Both are illusions. I act or I don't. Hoping wastes time. I never act out of hope. I act out of a moral code that sustains me, that makes sense, that I hope is in accordance with the basic laws of and mechanics of existence. I make mistakes, and they take me in a new, truer direction. Hope only delays the journey.
Be at peace, act in peace.
[original post]
Many religious believers do treat "hope" as a "wish that things be as I want them." This is what gives rise to the claim that atheism is "incompatible with hope," because there is no god out there to rearrange things for my benefit. Hope, though, need not merely be the wish that things be different; it can also be the expectation that things can be different. Such an expectation may be based on a reasoned evaluation of the prospects for change and is arguably a necessary precondition for acting. Why bother trying to make things different unless we have some sort of expectation that change is possible and that our own actions are capable of making a difference?
Hope as merely wishing that something become true is no more useful than faith as merely wishing something already is true. Hope as the reasoned expectation that change is possible is no more dispensable than faith as the reasoned expectation that something already is the case. While it may be difficult to get people to recognize the nuances which lie behind the concept of faith, we shouldn't assume that the same is true of hope as well. Indeed, one might argue that it's important to have hope that more people can be brought to understand and appreciate reasoned hope over irrational, passive hoping.
Comments
ddjango is correct in that hope is equivalent to making a wish, especially when the odds are against you. Having hope for a particular outcome to a given issue puts a personalized EMOTIONAL nuance to that issue that is otherwise governed by cold, hard, statistics-based probability. For example, even though a person (or at least a rational person) knows the odds are with the house at a casino (or else casinos wouldn’t last long as businesses) one still emotionally HOPES to beat those odds when one plays.
so why do i post my comments on this web site and why do you answer back, it because we both HOPE the other one will listen.
Several times I have piloted a single aircraft across a rather large body of water. I always had faith that the engine would not fail. (Otherwise, I would not have begun the crossing in the first place!) After beginning the crossing I always found myself “hoping” my faith was justified. This is how I define faith and hope.
Hope is the agony of the human race. (Nietsche.)
Like most words, hope has several meanings depending on context. As we discuss hope we should be clear which we mean.
Anywho. In the case of the CotW, DDjango describes hope as being akin to a delusion or wish. i feel that is not the case, at least not all the time. i hope to one day publish a card game i’ve designed. In the sense that hope alone won’t make it true, DDjango is right. But that hope (or desire, really) motivates me to action. By action, hopes can BECOME real. Humanity hopes to leave Earth and explore other planet, that hope impelled flight and later, rockets and the space shuttle. Hope doesn’t make things happen. Action does. But action requires a hope.
If i lost hope for publishing my game, i’d stop working on it.
Hope is the force that drives life. Methinks DDjango might be describing something else.
I have always thought hope was an emotion. I think it is incredibly important as a motivator to keep going when something extremely difficult happens to us. Some people have come back from Mt. Everest that would have given up and died if not for the emotion of hope. Hope is the feeling that there is a chance, however small, that something can happen. I believe the reason we have this emotion could be attributed to the ‘prime directive’ of life, survival.