I think the question is clear enough, it's just a "big" concept.
And now my life's story, condensed into a paragraph or three.
For 30 years I was an atheist, what I now consider a "weak" atheist. Despite growing up in a Baptist church and a believing family, I never believed in God. The "weak" part was I never really knew why I didn't believe.
At age 30 I went to Alcoholics Anonymous to stop drinking. Don't let them fool you, if they had their choice between you stopping drinking and finding God, they'd have you find God. But then they believe you can't possibly find God without stopping drinking - drinking alcohol, even one sip, makes for a "spiritual falling out" with God or whatever. They'll even argue you left God well before taking the first sip.
But yeah, I quit drinking and found God and went to 90 meetings in 90 days, and kept going to daily meetings for a couple years after that, and while I saw some things in AA I didn't think were quite right, whenever I'd say something about it I was quickly dismissed with "you're still young in the program" - the biggest awe and respect went to "old timers" those with "double digit sobriety" and especially those with 20 or more years in the program without drinking.
After a couple years in that "perfect program for imperfect people" I started to really see the cracks in the program, and started seriously questioning the things I saw, at least to myself and in my own mind. I'd learned not to question things OPENLY - most people would just think I was a newcomer and hadn't learned yet.
But I started to believe it was a lie, not that anyone was so much lying to me, because they apparently believed what they said, the same as I had believed it the previous years, but I was discovering that something isn't neccesarily true just because I or a million or two billion people believe it's true.
I went against AA's slogan of "uitilize, don't analyze" and I searched out evidence that God doesn't exist. Well, not really, I started reading up on cults, and I DID find evidence that people can be convinced that something is true just by spending time around those who believe it's true and hearing them talk about it as if it were true.
(Insert long bibliology here, dozens of books, Nova "Secrets of the Psychics" and Frontline "Prisoners of Silence" but perhaps most pivotal was Susan Blackmore's "Adventures of a Parapsychologist").
All I can choose to do is be open to it or not. If I look for faith, faith comes (but I can't control when, how, or in what form) and if I look away from faith, faith goes.
So you CAN control when faith goes away! Fascinating.
Say I have a really bad marriage. It's a horrible experience filled with emotion and evidence that this is really a BAD choice of mate for me.
Theoretically I can choose not to marry the next one that comes along that is much the same kind of person as the one I had the really bad marriage to. I could also not think about it and fall into the same kind of relationship. Or I could ignore my experience and actively make the choice to marry into the same kind of hell as before, for whatever reason.
Just an example (however off-the-cuff-bad it is) that experience, emotion and evidence don't negate the fact that people make choices, even if it's on a sub/unconscious level. The two feed into each other; they're not mutually exclusive.
I guess I don't understand your question.
I think your point about a bad marriage has to do with belief about oneself, and questioning oneself - "There's some things I don't like about this marriage, maybe I should get a divorce. But could I find a better wife/husband? I don't think so, I doubt it. I don't deserve anyone better."
It may not seem like hell if the person doesn't really know any better (as in having experienced an abusive childhood), or doesn't believe they deserve any better (ditto).
(In response to Dr Zoidberg) Actually, that's really not quite what I'm asking, and I think I'm phrasing things poorly.
So...I'll try again. I make choices every day. I choose what to wear, what to eat, mostly my choices are mundane. Whether or not what is happening in my brain really is a free selective choice, that is how I experience it.
But I've never been able to choose to believe in a god. When I was younger, I actively tried and failed many times. My lack of belief never seemed to be a choice.
When people talk of choosing Christianity, or choosing Islam, or choosing Atheism, it leaves me baffled.
My experiences may not be typical, other people may indeed actively choose to believe or not. Hence my question. And thank you to everyone who is replying despite my inability to be clear over this.
I think that's not how it happens. What happens is you get invited to a church, you're new so you get "love bombed" with attention and welcoming and "Oh, we're so GLAD you decided to come worship with us this Sunday!" and so going there becomes a regular thing, and...
When I was early in AA "chose to believe" in God totally of my own accord, OR SO I THOUGHT. I thought I had independently made the decision to believe in God and that I should follow the 12 steps and everything else it says to do in the first 164 pages of the Big Book of AA. I had "independently" decided to do THE EXACT SAME THING THAT EVERYONE AROUND ME WAS DOING. That was not just a coincidence.
I've chosen to believe everything except that there is a benevolent, all-loving, good and kind Creator personage who loves me but thinks I should spend more time thinking about Him and even do Him the favor of thinking He really Exists just for once for Pete's sake.
The hard part of believing in everything (with that one exception noted above) is spending any time at all with many of the potential Beings even for a purely mental split second. I'm working very hard on believing in Acupuncture at the moment. It seems like an impossible thing to believe in. Belief in an all-loving Creator of the Cosmos who loves me all the time but finds me somewhat full of Sin would be much easier. But that's the problem. Why exercise the faculty of belief if just to believe in easy-to-believe things? Where's the fun in that?
Want to believe in Acupuncture? Stop TRYING to believe. Go spend some time with people who believe, ask them about it, maybe get acupuncture treatment if offered, learn everything they say about it, etc. I won't say you WILL believe, but you're chances are a lot better doing that than sitting around in isolation trying to believe in acupuncture.
No. This doesn't mean I couldn't believe no matter what. It just means I couldn't simply decide to start believing. I would need to be witness to an experience or gain some knowledge that I found convincing enough to become a theist.
This is something I tried to explain to family members that were trying to convert me. They kept saying I just had to "take that faith step". I had to get them to clarify what they meant by that. Essentially, what they were saying, is that I would need to start believing it, without reason to, before I could see that it was real.
*brain implodes*
So basically, fake it til you make it.
That (bolding mine) is an often-repeated AA slogan!
I got more (the next post about childhood and quoting Alice Miller about surviving childhood) but I'm up way too late.