Hello wonderful, brilliant Hatrack. I had an interesting discussion tonight and I had it with all the intelligent people I know and still was not satisfied. So I asked, "where else can I find a bunch of smart people?" and I answered "Hatrack, of course". So here it is ... There's the Bible verse "...Faith, hope and love, but the greatest is love" or something along those lines. Well, I know what Faith is and what its purpose is, and I know at least vaguely what Love is and what its purpose is, but no one can seem to answer me as to what Hope is and what it's purpose is. To put it plainly, to me Hope seems to be useless. Everyone seems to automatically disagree with that (maybe its just my friends are optimists), but no one can ever give me a real explanation or reason. So, I ask you, what is Hope and what purpose does it serve in our lives?
Posted by El JT de Spang (Member # 7742) on :
My one sentence definition of Hope is this:
The belief that things can always get better.
I guess you use that same definition for Optimism, but I don't know.
Posted by andi330 (Member # 8572) on :
I think that Hope is the idea that no matter how bad things are, no matter what may come, things can get better. It's people who have no hope who commit suicide. I know, at one point in my life I had lost all hope, I seriously considered ending my own life. If this was all that life was going to be for me then I didn't want it.
I chose not to, and eventually I began to see that things would get better. There was, for lack of a better term, a glimmer of HOPE on the horizon. Things had to get better because they couldn't get worse.
If I hadn't been able to HOPE for something better, I have little doubt that I would be dead now. HOPE saved my life, actually Faith, Hope and Love (all three) saved my life. Love may be the greatest (as the verse indeed says) but without Hope, I don't think love would have saved me that time.
Posted by Dr Strangelove (Member # 8331) on :
See, this is where my problem lies ... what is the difference between faith and hope? Faith seems to me the "belief" part. Confidence. For instance, I have faith that I will go to heaven when I die. I do not HOPE I will. That just seems wishy washy. Its either going to happen or it won't. What I hope has nothing to do with the matter. So what is the difference between hope and faith?
Posted by andi330 (Member # 8572) on :
I HOPE that things will get better when I can't find the FAITH to believe that they will.
Posted by Joldo (Member # 6991) on :
Believing people can change is hope.
Faith is knowing that there's no need to change, because the good's already there. It simply has to be brought out.
Posted by Janger (Member # 4719) on :
Since you've gotten that passage from a Bible, the definition of hope must be derived from the biblical aspect. The faith, hope, and love all refers to faith, hope, and love of God. To lose hope in God is rejecting the knowledge of God's omniscient, omnipotent, and infinite powers. So Hope in the religious aspect is that nomatter how desperate and dark our current circumstances are, we must accept them gracefully and to have full hope in God. Since God is infinitely perfect, even if He allowed evil to occur, it would bring about an even greater good.
I'm not sure this is a good example but the current hurricanes devastating thousands of people. The death and destruction was an extremely sad time, but the supportive response it received from millions of people from all over the world can be considered good.
Posted by Dr Strangelove (Member # 8331) on :
I have FAITH in God. I must have full Faith in God. I just don't get where the Hope part applies. Everything you said about Hope, Janger, can be replaced, possibly more accurately, with Faith. Yet the Bible clearly differentiates the two. They are different things, supposedly on a somewhat equal level. Faith is the belief in things unseen. Such as God or the future. I can have faith that everything will turn out good and be considered an optimist. I can have faith that they will turn out bad and be considered a pessemist. Hope does nothing. It is purposeless.
Posted by Dr Strangelove (Member # 8331) on :
(hit enter too quick) Belief is a synonym for faith, not something different. Belief = confidence = faith. Hope seems almost to smack of unconfidence. "I sure HOPE this happens. Maybe it will maybe it won't".
Posted by andi330 (Member # 8572) on :
According to the footnotes in Zondervan's NIV Study Bible for the verse in question. The following appears in regards to 1 Corinthians 13:13 on p. 2083 of the above publication:
"Love involves unselfish service to others; to show it gives evidence that you care. Faith is the foundation and content of God's message; hope is the attitude and focus; love is the action."
Posted by andi330 (Member # 8572) on :
In essence, if you do not have hope, then you cannot have faith; and if you do not have faith, then you cannot truly love.
Hope is my attitude which is the foundation for my faith. If I do not first hope that something can be true then I will never believe that it is.
Posted by Janger (Member # 4719) on :
I guess it makes more clear sense if you use the terms hopelessness and faithlessness. Hopelessness can include that you believe in the existence of God but He cannot help you in this case, you have lost hope that God can help you. Faithlessness is the belief that God does not exist, thus you do not believe that your personal cirumstance can get better because there is no one there for you. You cannot possibly escape from your present circumstance because there is no God, and only God could possibly save you.
I'm not sure if that helps. I must admit they're very similar.
Posted by Dr Strangelove (Member # 8331) on :
So once you have faith, hope becomes unnecessary?
Posted by andi330 (Member # 8572) on :
One of my favorite definitions of the word faith is from the Disney movie The Rescuers:
"Faith is a bluebird you see from afar. It's for real and as sure as the first evening star. You can't touch it, or buy it or wrap it up tight; but it's there just the same, making things turn out right."
Posted by Janger (Member # 4719) on :
Is that a question directed to me Dr?
Posted by andi330 (Member # 8572) on :
No, hope is the attitude and focus of faith. Without an attitude of hope, faith is dead.
Posted by Dr Strangelove (Member # 8331) on :
Its directed at whoever will answer. I don't have a retort for it ... I'm genuinely curious as to what you all think.
Posted by andi330 (Member # 8572) on :
To put it another way:
Faith is the essence of God's message. He tells us that we must have faith. In order to have faith it must have an attitude and focus. That attitude is hope. I can believe in God without having Faith in Him. Belief and Faith are NOT the same thing. There were years of my life when I believed in God without having Faith that He would keep his promises. It was only when I was able to hope again that my faith returned.
Edit: In fact during my years without faith I truly believed that God hated me. I fueled that believe with verses like "Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated." Which were words out of God's own mouth.
Posted by Dr Strangelove (Member # 8331) on :
I just don't understand why you must maintain an attitude of hope when you have faith. I think the word that would be used to describe my point of view is 'fatalistic'. Once I have the faith that whatever will be, will be, it ceases to matter what I personally hope for. Faith seems to be trusting that everything will turn out they way it will turn out. Hope seems to be hoping that something will turn out a certain way. If you have complete faith, it won't matter what you hope for.
Posted by KPhysicsGeek (Member # 8655) on :
I think there is a difference between pasive hope and active hope. Pasive hope just allows you to sit back and say, "Someone else will take care of it." Active hope on the other hand calls me to action by saying, "This can be better, and I can make it better." That's just my two cents.
Posted by andi330 (Member # 8572) on :
Actually what you hope for is essential to your faith. The fact that you are asking this question at all says to me that there has probably not been a time in your life when you lost ALL hope.
I hope that I am correct in this assumption.
I say that because anyone who has ever lost all hope does not have faith. They may still have belief but not faith. The distinction is important. That time was one of the darkest in my life. I hope that you never have to experience it.
Posted by Princess Leah (Member # 6026) on :
What's the point of hope? So we don't all jump of cliffs when life shows its true evil %&@%(*&$ self.
Favorite quote, Prior from Tony Kushner's Angels In America (I know, I know, you hate me for even mentioning it) :
"If I can find hope anywhere that’s it; that’s the best I can do. It’s so much not enough. It’s so inadequate. But still. Bless me anyway. I want more life."
It's not enough, but it's the best there is.
Posted by Janger (Member # 4719) on :
I definitely think that Hope is necessary. If you have a complete faith in God, hope will also come into play. Hope in God cannot exist without faith in God, but faith can exist without hope in God. Thus, it doesn't matter if you believe that God exists if you think that He's seperated Himself from creation. I believe hoplessness is a greater sin than faithlessness. Knowing that God exists and not caring is worse than not knowing or believing that God exists and thus, will not help you. Hopelessness is a belief is a cold and unloving being, while people who know God know that He is Love.
Posted by andi330 (Member # 8572) on :
quote:Originally posted by Dr Strangelove: (hit enter too quick) Belief is a synonym for faith, not something different. Belief = confidence = faith. Hope seems almost to smack of unconfidence. "I sure HOPE this happens. Maybe it will maybe it won't".
A synonym is a word that has the same OR NEARLY the same meaning as another word. They do not necessarily mean exactly the same thing.
Posted by Dr Strangelove (Member # 8331) on :
Ok, laptop is dying and midterms are calling. Yes, I'm beginning to understand now, though I'm sure I'd have more to say if I weren't so dang tired. And yeah, I do agree now that faith and belief are two different things and my quoted statement was a bit of idiocy. :-). On that note, goodnight.
Posted by andi330 (Member # 8572) on :
I would say again that belief and faith are not the same thing. They have similar meanings:
Belief: The mental act, condition, or habit of placing trust or confidence in another.
Faith: The theological virtue defined as secure belief in God and a trusting acceptance of God's will.
Similar but not the same. The above definitions are from Dictionary.com.
Edit: I posted this while you were posting your last post Dr. Sorry.
Posted by Tatiana (Member # 6776) on :
quote: Hope is a state of mind, not of the world . . . Either we have hope or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.
Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons . . .
Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is.
Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
Posted by Nato (Member # 1448) on :
The Red Cross thinks HOPE is pretty important.
...hope this helps.
Posted by Melissa Dedinová (Member # 7890) on :
ak, that was SO the first text I read in the literature section of my Czech class. !
To speak to the question, the New Testament talks about the "hope" of a Christian as being in Christ. We have the hope of the resurrection, both his and ours, the hope of everlasting life, no longer the hopelessness and futility of life without Christ. Etc. Lots of hope. But it is very much not the kind of hope that says, "I hope it doesn't rain today;" you are right that that is a wishy-washy and pointless word in the Christian context. Hope for a Christian means confidence. And, as put by a titular non-theist, "the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." Even if everything I hope for on earth falls through, my Hope is still constant, because not based on this earth.
Posted by Teshi (Member # 5024) on :
My definitions.
Faith = the "knowledge" that everything will turn out in the right way (usually the good way) Hope = the wish-belief that things will turn out well. Optimism = that general idea that everything's going to be okay.
I make a distinction because faith to me implies that something is guiding the outcome, whether it be a higher power ("I have faith in God") or an actual person ("I have faith in you to pass your driving test"). It's a stronger belief because there is some way of steering the outcome to a better result.
Hope can include a guiding power but it doesn't have to. It's weaker than faith because it often implies that whatever's going on is mostly out of your or anyone else's hands; there's much less certainty. I called it a 'wish-belief' because for me it's sort of half way between the two- stronger than a wish yet weaker than a belief.
A wish is the weakest: "I wish it was going to okay but I know it's not". It's the final vestiges of the hope (I'm running out of words here) that something good might come of whatever's going on.
Hope is not optimism. Hopeful = optimistic, but the nouns for me aren't the same. Optimism is far more general. An optimism has hope or faith generally.
Okay, the other part of the question is why is hope useful. My answer is that when you cannot have faith, hope is the next line of defence, as it were. Since very little in this world can be for certain, hope plays a major role. You don't "have faith"[/i] you passed your exam unless you know you aced it; you "hope".
For an atheist, "faith" plays a much smaller part in belief, so hope is cruicially important. Nothing is for certain- no one's really actually steering the ship- so we "hope" that we're not going to go crashing over a waterfall.
For the faithful, in times of desperation (disease on a personal or widespread level, war, any sort of situation with an unhappy prognosis) when faith becomes difficult to hold on to because people are dead or dying and there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to it, hope takes up the fight. Ideally, of course, a believer in God would like to hold on to his or her faith and believes that he or she can but that's not always possible or realistic.
Hope is: "To hell with this! I'm going to live!"
Posted by Danzig (Member # 4704) on :
Hope is knowing that things can always get worse, but knowing that they have only gotten better with each new day in the past.
Posted by Jim-Me (Member # 6426) on :
Faith is, I believe, trust in things that are (to greater or lesser extent) proven: you have faith in a friend, you have faith in gravity, you have faith in reason, you have faith in your God.
Hope is trust in things that aren't at all proven. You hope that things will come right in the end, because you have faith in God (or, perhaps, Karma or the justice system). You hope that you'll get to say goodbye to your loved ones before you die. You hope that all the little things you do here will add up to something worthwhile.
Faith, IMO, breeds hope. Both are essential to pressing on in the face of overwhelming odds or entropy.
Posted by Dr Strangelove (Member # 8331) on :
mmmm ... we seem to be going a bit on the spiritual side, which is fine, but I just hit on a verse in the Bible (which I knew before, just forgot about) which provides interesting speculation: Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. (NIV). So perhaps if we had perfect faith, we would have no more need for hope, because we would be sure of everything. But as we do not have perfect faith, we must still hope as a preface to faith. Does that make sense at all?
Posted by jeniwren (Member # 2002) on :
Jim-Me, that post was lovely. I'm so glad you wrote it.
Posted by Brinestone (Member # 5755) on :
Not sure if anyone cares, but the LDS definition of hope is a little more specific. We define hope (in the sense of faith, hope, and charity) as the perfect trust that we will be counted among Christ's children if we have faith, repent, and endure to the end. In that sense, hope is a combination of trust in Christ (not just belief) and excitement to get there.
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