He may not be hoping for water on the other side of every dune, but he is surely hoping to live through the experience, otherwise he would just give up and lay down and die.

Hope is a powerful force. It helps people survive seemingly unbearable situations and circumstances (such as oppression) by allowing them to consider the possibility that things will get better and to have faith in that possibility. The strength of hope can be seen in how hard it is to rid yourself of it. Even the most cynical person occasionally feels hope and it can often be very difficult to shut it out completely.

I think you are completely wring in your equation of hope with blind optimism. They are two vastly different things.

But what would you do if you had no hope of finishing it?  Would you continue the current emphasis?

Which leads to another question, if one does not hope does that mean that the person has no hope?  I'm not sure.

Is there ever a need for faith?


To be completely honest I don't have the expectation of finishing my degree, and I really don't have a desire to do it either.  It's just something I'm doing because it may make my life a bit easier to have a degree.  You could say that I hope for a happy life, but that would be inaccurate.  I don't have the expectation that "everything will work out" because rarely does everything work out as planned. 

I must reiterate that one can be passionate without hope.  You're trying very hard to defend the Western post-christian notion that hope is good without giving evidence for what a person with hope can do that a person without it cannot.

Yes, but it does not have to be in a theological format with doctrines and such.  Both hope and faith can be classified as emotions. Humans need emotions to help maintain stability in our lives and mental conditions.  When a person has no emotions they are sometimes called psychopaths, but even they have some emotions. For they have "faith/belief" that they will not be found to be in conflict with their living standards.



Again hope, passion, faith are all emotions.  Physically and mentally, neither one is more dominant. Hope cannot be shown to do more good than non hope and vice versa. They are at stalemate.  The difference comes from the emotional standpoint.  Hope as an emotion (desire with anticipation) can far outweigh the non hope.  As you noted in the Thanksgiving thread - you HOPE that everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving. Your emotional desire with anticipation for the betterment of everyone who read your note was received and then that "desire to have" was transmitted and accomplished by many others beside yourself, along with now connecting you to each of our experiences of Thanksgiving.  Creating a better understanding and community between you and the readers.

Now had you said "Happy Thanksgiving" in the non hopeful manner, the emotion is not the same, there is no connection, it is merely a warm Holiday saying which people enjoy for a second and then move on to another thought.

 

Supporting a 3rd party candidate for President.

Some quotes I found on hope:

I find hope in the darkest of days, and focus in the brightest. I do not judge the universe.
-- Dalai Lama

If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr

Once you choose hope, anything's possible.
-- Christopher Reeve

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
-- Oscar Wilde


Hope is not a dream but a way of making dreams become reality.
-- Author Unknown

It is. It's the possibility that it can be a reality.