I have to do some more thinking on hope and innocence. I think it means different things to different people (as well as in different cultures, as pertains to religions, between sexes, and across generations).

Your view on the role of religion and hope is interesting and something I also want to think about more. I have never connected the two, except in the sense that really desperate and hopeless people are much more vulnerable to religious influence than the more secure. But I also see hope as having an existence separate from religion. I've been very desperate and hopeless many times in my life, but have never found myself vulnerable to religion or delusional nonsense or a need to have faith in anything or anyone. I'm a rather hard-core atheist, and have never had any kind of interest in religion except from a psychological point of view, and especially as it relates to one of my special areas of interest: propaganda/indoctrination. I think faith is ridiculous and makes me feel embarrassed for people who achieve it so easily, but I believe that hope is necessary to have any kind of reason for living or trying to achieve something. Sorry, I'm kind of thinking out loud as I write here - I suppose, at least for myself, I associate hope with goal-setting, and it is perhaps a chicken and egg thing: do you need hope to set goals, or does having a goal give you hope? Of perhaps, they are just two very different and unrelated things. Maybe I define hope differently. Yeah, I need to think about this more.