My hopes are simple.  I hope to enjoy life and feel productive.  I hope my child has the same opportunity and more opporunity to enjoy life.

Without going into my hope vs your hope, I do want to talk about the conflict.  My belief in how to achieve what I consider a better world is at the expense of religion, borders, and inequity.  I hope for globalization.  Unlikely in my time, but perhaps for my kid or kid's kid or even farther down the line.

Why do I hope for that? Because it's what I think is right.  We all have such a limited time to experience our lives, we are blessed with true conciousness and undertanding and an incredible ability to learn.  I want mine, and everyones time spent on earth to be the best possible. I should also note that my life's enjoyment is directly impacted by the people around me.  So I am directly benefited by trying to have all people be happy, not just myself.

I have hope. But it's not the same as yours. I know my life has meaning and purpose. The difference is though, that I do not believe it to be a divinely inspired purpose. I know the purpose of my life, as well as life in general. It is to live. That is the basic purpose of all life. Live life to it's fullest, because one day.. it will end. And we can never be certain of what that end will contain untill it comes. My purpose is, whatever I make it.

I hope I make a difference in the things about which I'm passionate.  But you know, I don't have to hope I make a difference, I know I do.

My purpose in life is to make a difference in the things about which I'm passionate. 

Sometimes this can be accomplished by small things like kindnesses to other human beings.

In many cases, this can be accomplished by helping to care for animals. 

Many times, anyone can make a difference in volunterism. 

I know I can get through difficult circumstances, mostly with inner fortitude, but also with kindnesses shown to me. 

i have a mixed bag of hopes, because many of them have, at least partially come to pass.

i'd hoped that i would raise my children to be smart and wise and to always seek the truth, and as young teens they are already making me proud.

i'd hoped to find a wife who was intelligent, funny, sexy, whom i would never stop gazing at like a silly schoolboy, and who would be my very best friend. and i did.

i'd hoped to pass out of my lazy gen-x apathy and move on to a richer, fuller lifestyle where reading, learning and growing meant more than copping an attitude at a downtown bar, and i have.

i still have greater hopes. i hope to be part of the generation that turns the tide of global warming, so as to spare my children and grandchildren. i hope i live to see the discovery of cures for things like cancer and aids, i know i having nothing to offer intellectually towards these goals but to witness the beginning of the end of these diseases would be a wonderful thing.
 my biggest hopes, though, are always for my children. i hope that at some point in their lives a year can pass where they aren't bombarded with news of senseless violence and pointless wars. there's been no such year in my lifetime, but i'd like to think there will be in theirs.

and last, i guess i hope i never stop caring as much as i do about the world i live in, because you can't change something once you become indifferent to it, and there's a lot of things in this world that need to be changed. 

What an extraordinarily nice thread

My hopes? Short term stuff, mostly.

I hope that someday mankind gets its **** sorted out but I won't be around by then.

I hope to live forever, but fat chance.

I hope to eat more pizza... ideally without getting too round-shaped.

I hope to be allowed into the US to marry my fiancée.

I hope we can make the marriage work.

I hope I can support her in the manner to which I'd like her to become accustomed.

Yes, that's sexist, she can support herself, and we intend to be childfree. Still. Like women feel they have to be good looking, men feel they have to be providers. Same kind of stupidity I guess.

I hope I can move to the US to be ith her, or she can move here.

I hope I can own my own home someday.

I hope to learn bladesmithing.

[MOD EDIT to remove curse word - This is the Kill 'Em With Kindness forum]

My only hope in life is to be happy. I don't care about the details as much...

Thanks to everyone who responded, I do appreciate it. I have some questions about some things brought up in the responses that I don't understand or seek clarification on.

I wish to restate again my intention NOT to have this be a "my hope is better than your hope" thread (otherwise I would have put it in Atheist v. Theist) so I will make every effort to word things as best I can so as not to be insensitive, but please keep in mind that I am asking from a position of ignorance (I don't know what you think) and am seeking clarification. I recognize hope as a universal human belief, but for me it is tied strongly to my theist belief system and is therefore difficult for me to understand hope apart from God.

Hope has been used in this thread to refer to two basic kinds of things: things we can control and things we cannot control. I see hope in something one can control as more of an aspiration than a hope and don't address them here. (But I do hope for cold beer too.) I'm interested in the things we hope for that at least have a major element that we cannot control. In that light, I would like to assert that hope is irrational by its very nature and the rational person should try to eliminate it from their life. (That's an extreme statement I know but that's why I'm asking you.)

One of the common hopes (one I share) was some form of "hope for world peace". To me this seems noble but ultimately irrational. The question that comes to my mind first is, "Who will bring about this peace?" If this hope is placed in us (mankind), I immediately think of our track record. To put in frankly, we suck at peace. We weaponize every piece of technology and use every bit of scientific discovery to build bigger, better killing devices. In fact, much (if not the majority) of scientific and technological discovery has as its drivers weapons and war.

Call me a pessimist but here's where my rationality leads me on the question of peace:

Large Brain + Opposable Thumb + Time = BOOM!

Why hope for world peace when the evidence points to destruction?

A second hope expressed on many threads was hope to be loved or for our loved ones to do well. I want to be really careful here because we all hold love and our loved ones so dear but I also want to understand. My assumption about love (especially familial love) is that it is (ideally) unselfish and unconditional, these seem to ring true with the definitions I have read and the people I have asked about it. But I don't see how this ideal fits with the Darwinian model. For example, do I really love (unselfishly) my kids or is "love" really just biology's way of motivating me to take care my offspring so that I pass on my genes? Do my kids really love me (again, unselfishly) or do they simply need me? Perhaps my question is , "Does (unselfish) love exist?" So why hope to be loved when the best we can really do is to be needed or to be useful?

Nietzsche sums up where my mind goes when I think about hope without God or an afterlife.

The fact there are over six billion of us and this number continues to expand?  There have always been wars but we continue to increase in numbers.

World peace will never happen.  However it's not neccessary for the survival of the human race.   

Does it really matter?  The end result is the same. 

Wrong.  We can and are loved.  I have 13 years with the same woman to back that up. 

Yeah, but Freddy was a total emo kid.  I on the other hand have absolutely no need to believe in God or an afterlife to have hope because they're totally unrelated.  How, for example, is faith in God going cure your child from cancer?  Surely having hope and, heck, faith in medicine would be a better idea?

The human spirit requires no crutch to help it hope and love an dream.  It's one of the fundamentals that actualy makes our otherwise silly little species rather special.

Hi jive turkey.  Well, guess what.  I have no children and I have no spouse. I'm not at all concerned about keeping my gene pool going.

Yet, I have dear friends that I would do just about anything for. 

I'm not sure what you mean by "the best we can really do is to be needed or to be useful" because you're not mixing in the emotional part of a relationship. 

Yes, I hope my friends need me (I hope they enjoy my company and look forward to spending time with me).  Yes, I hope to be useful to my friends (geez, if they're in trouble and I can help, I sure hope they call me).

They do not need me to survive or get through the day, but I hope I enrich their lives a bit and they're happy they know me.

Does that make sense?

I live because I want to live. Why wouldn't I? What I hope for? A brighter tomorrow. Less or no war. Prosperity for all. Etc.

You don't have people to love you? You don't have any reason to live without a god? Why?

I'm usually rather cynical during difficult times. My survival instinct however would never allow me to kill myself without an extremely good reason. The only option is to carry on.

I don't know that I do. I have value to me. I want to exist, now that I do anyway. That's good enough of a reason to exist for me.

Err... no. We used to have the charming habit of lobbing infected corpses into cities to spread plague, small pox and cholera amongst other diseases during sieges. Of course, germ warfare is now banned by international law.

They already are. Fortunately the rest of the world will turn them and their sponsors into a pile of ash if they do.

How so? Please show me where I swore or engaged in a personal attack. How does wishing for an end to religion make me "unkind"? The world would be better off if religion ended tomorrow.

Would you rather I lie and say I don't want religion to end?

I think you are confused about exactly what I mean. I do want religion to end, but not by force. I want it to end because people finally realize they are lying to themselves and that it is causing strife in their personal, familial, national and international relationships. All we are doing is engaging in discourse in the hope of ending the greatest scourge humanity has ever seen.

If you want proof that religion is that destructive, I can point you to several tomes.

If my opinion offends you, that is your problem.  If your opinion offends me, that is my problem.  No one is allowed to go through life unoffended. 

Moderators try to conduct themselves within the rules. I haven't broken any rules. No, I wasn't trying to be offensive. If anything, I was trying to make a joke.

The goal of the Rational Response Squad is to end religion. I think it was in the Nightline interview that Sapient said his goal wasn't realistic: it was to end religion tomorrow. What I wrote was based both on the RRS's reason for existence and our hope that religion will end tomorrow, however unrealistic that goal is.

I think you are possibly operating on the assumption that religion deserves some sort of special consideration simply because it is religion. We don't play that here, even in the Kill 'Em With Kindness forum. Sorry. The beliefs of religionists must sink or swim according to whether or not they can withstand intense scrutiny, just like any other belief.

My bad for not reading the rules.  I am at fault.

I can think of no rational reason for you to make that assumption...but it's not a problem for me since you are curious.