I think it depends on exactly what you're hoping for. If you're hoping that your logical arguments will convince them, then it is unreasonable. If you're hoping that your arguments might possibly "plant the seed" for them to later explore their beliefs, I don't think that's unreasonable. However, I would say that, generally speaking, if religion has completely poisoned their mind, they may be beyond hope. I suppose, in this instance, hoping to "spread reason" isn't unreasonable. Expecting a definite outcome is. That's what I think, at least.

Precisely. My standard example, though I don't use it every time:

"I may be hopeful to win the lottery this week but it would be unreasonable for me to hope to win it every week over the next 12 months." (They HATE the gambling line...tee-hee)

OK well, again with what you are saying Hamby, it appears I am going about it in a proper way. I usually do tell them that I personally (as an Atheist) have hope about a great many things but if they are equating hope with faith in a god or afterlife, then their thinking is at best unreasonable and at worst incorrect. After, I will often tell/show them why they are wrong to believe hope=faith....if they haven't run away yet.

 

I am also curious to know how many other Atheists in the Belt there are in the forums.  There just aren't many Atheists/Agnostics around where I live. So unless I'm posting or reading here, there isn't anyone to "kick ideas"  around with.

Thanks for all the replies and more please!

 

If hope means what it means to normal people, it would actually be wrong of a Christian to hope.  They're supposed to have faith, which is blind belief.  Hope is doubtful.  I hope I will have a nice dinner because I'm not sure.  If you give me reservations to a three star Michelin restaurant, I don't hope anymore.  I know it will be good.  (At least, I know well enough that I don't feel hopeful about the quality of the meal anymore.)

Same with Christians.  If they hope they're going to go to heaven, they don't know.  If they don't know, then they don't have faith, which is blind belief -- not blind desire.

 

 

DERAIL ALERT!!!

It turns out, delusion is often more optimistic than realism.  A couple of decades ago, some scientists set out to prove that chronically depressed people were suffering from a delusionally pessimistic view of reality.  Turns out, depressed people had a more accurate grasp on reality than did people who were consistently happy.  The most compelling explanation to me is that the world is unfair, nasty, and brutal.  We all will lose to the universe, and we really are fighting an uphill battle most of our lives.  Depression, however, keeps us from fighting at all, and that tends to keep us from fucking, and that's what our genes really want us to do.  Natural selection has favored people who are somewhat delusional about their own power in the universe.

The obvious question:  Does that have something to do with why people believe there's a great big daddy in the sky who will make magic happen just for them?

I'll let you answer that for yourself.

 

 

That's such a brilliant point, It's a diamond studded treasure!! I'm going to sear that into my brain for future references.

Well...

I hope your dinner is awful! I hope you bite your tongue and it becomes gangrious and you have to cut it off!

I hope your car gets run over by a mac truck and it explodes and you live but you have 3rd degree burns and live as a mutilated freak for the rest of your life!

 

*takes tongue out of cheek*

 

Not only can hope be completely unreasonable, I can be entirely negative, too. Hope is nothing but a projection of your wants, however rational or irrational. It has little to do with belief.

"Is there a point at which hope becomes unreasonable?"

Yes, every election cycle.

[derail response]

My only problem is that not everyone procreates and some people, it would seem, have it in their genes not to procreate.  Is fucking really what our genes want all of us to do?  I mean, I fuck, but what I do will never perform the task my genes are supposed to be 'really' after, right?  Or are my genes not after that at all?

[/derail response]

We agree the anthropomorphization is just for conceptual use.  Anyhow, is not my brain and chemistry dictated by my genes?  How do we distinguish exactly between my brain's structure being the outcome of my genes or of soemthing else?  How do we distinguish between my brain chemistry being affected by environmental and not genetic pressures?  Are any of these possibilities mutually exclusive?  What are the implications?  Do my genes make me more susceptible to structural and chemical changes?  I think all those questions are relevant and I think it is naïve to assume that being exclusively homosexual is only due brain to structure and chemistry, especially without knowing whether the structure and chemistry are due to environment or genetics and to what degree if both... I don't think the answer has been found out yet.

Edit: Forgive me for derailing this thread.

On topic, hope is distinguishable from faith.  When hope and faith are indistinguishable someone is making a categorical error.  Sometimes when people are hoping what they're really doing is praying and sometimes when they're praying in that way they're being contradictory to their beliefs (read theists).  Even an atheist could fall victim to hope that isn't hope but is actually a kind of wish, one you don't consciously admit is not coming true.

Ah!  Haha... I know all that, Kevin.  Really, you don't have to 'talk down' to me or explain that genes are not thinking things (it's kind of insulting, actually).  I'm just fairly certain that the exact cause of homosexuality is not known (and to be clear I am never talking about homosexuality that results from mental trauma or that sort of 'environmental' factor, that is a whole other beast and is fairly well understood in psychology and is not the homosexuality I'm addressing -so banish the thought that there are the cultural and environmental factors to consider; there aren't).  And, forgive me, but you don't have the answer, least not the whole of it.  It sure would be odd, wouldn't it, if homosexuality had nothing to do with how a brain functions?  We're pretty well aware that it does, but that entirely fails to answer the questions I asked.

Ambition works just as well as hope if not better. That's my motto.

If you're talking about hope in the sense of faith and hope for an afterlife and eternal bliss and what not. It tends to be what separates the agnostics from the atheists. They think rationally and realise how illogical religious theories can be but they keep some form of hope that there is a God/afterlife/ or whatever the hope is yearning for because it gives life a set purpose and a meaning for existence.

 

Everyone is entitled to their beliefs and if people hope for something beyond this life or a higher force, good luck to them......... But they are wrong

A christian (well, she was dressed as a nun), once took part in a debate with me about godlessness being the ruination of society. The society in question was holy catholic Ireland and we were two teams at university level in a sort of knock-out competition. We were both considered the heavyweights of the tournament, and even though this was only about the quarter final stage the hall was packed. We wrongly thought the audience must have considered that whoever got through this round was the ultimate winner but in fact, as quickly became clear once the cheering began, the happy-clappy brigade had come out in force to back their champions. Given that a show of hands was used to award crucial points to the "winners", our team of four (one atheist, two agnostics and an alcoholic) resigned itself to elimination before the thing had even begun.

 

Anyway, this young woman who wanted everyone to call her "sister Eucaria", preceded me in the order and had taken as her angle to emphasise how a society without god was a hopeless society, in both meanings of the term - the literal and the euphemistic. She trotted out the usual assertions (strictly speaking a bad move in a debate - unfounded assertions - but not with this crowd) - and ended with a beatific smile, a blessed virginly upraising of the forearms, and an emphatic statement to the effect that hope was gods' greatest gift to us and that those (a patronising sneer shot in our direction) who would deny that hope were little more than thieves. Where people like us existed, she averred, satan himself was redundant. This got a standing ovation.

 

I'd been scribbling notes throughout and, though I knew I was as likely to get a hail of rotten tomatoes as a single clap at the end of it, had hurriedly assembled a small speech that took each of her assertions apart, proved they were unsubstantiated by fact, and that therefore her entire contribution could be disregarded. I was about to stand up when the alcoholic, already three sheets in the wind, whispered to me that, as captain, he was pulling rank and was going to go before me. Wthout waiting to hear my objection he staggered unevenly up to the podium - a prop he needed more than any other debater that night.

 

His rather measured and dramatic (ie. drunk) delivery of his opening thanks to everyone present for attending managed to subdue the happy-clappies, or at least confuse them into silence, and within a few seconds you could hear a pin drop in the big hall. But it was not by any means a respectful silence. One could see a sly sneer start with the first christian in the room and quickly spread, almost telepathically, to each and every one of them within seconds. This, they knew, was their moment of triumph. One could almost sense the rotten tomatoes being silently plucked from a thousand christian pockets and purses as he drawled and trawled himself into his speech, each hyper-sybilant preposition tripping languidly over its predecessor as his brain struggled to marshal whatever functionality remained into controlling his speech muscles.

 

Under the rules of the debate a person was entitled to ask up to three questions requesting clarification from the previous speaker without losing speech-time and he proceeded to ask permission from the referee to do so.  He asked "Mary O'Brien" to stand up. Stripped of her Eucarianess, and unaccustomed to being ordered to do anything by mere lay people, her previously pristine veneer of beatification and christian benigness evaporated in a puff, leaving a rather shifty, suspicious and evidently nervous young prig in its place. Even some of the christian sneers out in the audience evaporated with it.

 

"Miss O'Brien," he boomed, as his cerebrum finally kicked into gear, "Did you say that the increasing number of Irish women seeking abortions in England was a sign that society is losing hope?" He got a tentaive nod in reply. "Did you also say that every christian's hope is that the good are rewarded and the evil are punished, and that your hope was that eternal damnation awaited those wrong-doers?" She muttered a yes, as these indeed had been her words when she was speaking on behalf of all christians, or at least those in the room who had been whooping and clapping her every bold assertion. She, and the audience for whom she'd spoken, were both by now rather uneasy as they knew what was coming next. "And Miss O'Brien," he asked with a look of disdain and admonition on his drunken features, his bloodshot eyes boring into her (or a spot just to her left, it was hard to tell), "did you not also say that these unfortunate women were perpetrators of an evil act?" She nodded "yes".

 

All traces of alcohol had left his speech, and all traces of sneer had left the audience. "So, this "hope" that is a gift from your god and which all good hopeful Irish people should share, according to you, includes the hope that children be born to rape victims, and that one awful tragedy becomes two, should the child be unwanted or unloved on its arrival. Or alternatively the hope is that those same victims, in trying to mitigate the tragedy your god has chosen in his mysterious wisdom that they should undergo, will then burn for in hell for eternity?" He let the point sink in. "I submit, my friends, that Ireland should welcome the hopelessness my adversary deplores, and with open fucking arms!"

 

We won.