Beliefs are not a matter of choice. Religious or atheist self-identification is. You had the choice to keep practicing Catholicism despite your doubts, or to keep identifying as a Catholic despite your doubts and your lack of involvement in Catholic practices. You chose instead to stop practicing Catholicism and self-identify as an atheist.
I’m not an atheist. But I think going with your real beliefs instead of just going through the motions of a religion, or identifying as a member of a religion even though you don’t follow its beliefs and practices, is the more honest (with yourself and others) choice, and therefore better. Therefore, I think you’re to be congratulated for being willing to self-identify with your atheism.
In fact, I’m not an atheist because beliefs aren’t under voluntary control (or at least mine aren’t). I tried being one in college (after admitting to myself that I didn’t believe in the Protestant Christianity I grew up in). I found that, deep down, I really don’t believe that there is no God, and I can’t make myself believe that, any more than I could make myself believe in the creed of the Protestant church I had left. I’ve tried twice in my life to make myself believe something I didn’t, and failed both times.
My being brilliant and handsome aren’t choices, but I still get credit for them, right?
I think our beliefs are partly under our control and are affected by things that are under our control, such as our willingness to explore new evidence. I can choose not to investigate or think about my beliefs or I can do the opposite.
As far as deliberately changing a specific belief in a specific direction, I can’t do so by sheer will, but if, for example, I was determined to believe that people are basically evil (a typically “belief-y” belief) I might start spending time among victims of abuse hearing about what they went through, or reading about the complicity of the German people in the Holocaust. I might start telling myself that every person I see has probably hurt someone, or would given the right circumstances. If I wanted to believe that people are basically good, I might study people who have turned their lives around, or engage in Buddhist practices that are meant to foster compassion. I might find people who have dome bad things or made bad choices and listen to their stories non-judgmentally in an effort to understand them. None of those things is guaranteed to work, but they would make it more likely for my beliefs to change.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is based largely on the idea that our behaviors and emotions are based on our beliefs, which in turn our based on thoughts that can be controlled. A person who is depressed can change by using positive self-talk to change their beliefs about the world. I’m bothered that the technique doesn’t focus on whether the beliefs it tries to change are true (What if you really DO suck?) but its effectiveness is very well supported by research.
This basically gets at the crux of the matter. Belief is a dependent variable, but it’s not an immutable one. It can only be changed if external variables are changed. It can’t be changed by mere force of will. It has to be informed by independent data.
If you have a biological aversion to grease, then this statement might be extremely accurate. I’m sure there are some foods that others love which turn you off, right? Perhaps from very early childhood? Was hating sweet potatoes a choice for me, or something genetic. The latter, I think.
Through much of history, doubting the society’s religion was a life-limiting move. Atheists didn’t even have the support system that Jews did to encourage being different. Even today in most places you are looked on as a lazy slacker for not going to the church of your choice.
But I think religious belief is genetic. I think I inherited my lack of belief from my grandfather, who was fine with his daughter marrying a Catholic, pretty daring in the '30s. I enjoyed going to shul and getting bar mitzvahed, but I think it was more the Hebrew and the singing than any deep religious conviction. As soon as I really started looking at the history of the Bible, my thin religious veneer vanished. My kids, who inherited more atheism from my father-in-law, have no religious feeling at all, and they have been exposed to it.
200 years ago I’m sure I would have been happily going to Temple my whole life. Today I have the freedom not to.
I’d definitely buy that some people have no natural religious feeling, and that that’s genetic. But people who did have natural religious feeling, like me, can also switch to having none. And I think that while there are external factors involved in making that switch, there IS a choice involved in considering the evidence. Most religious types cling to their beliefs and rationalize away whatever evidence they are presented with.
I’m an agnostic but I totally agree with the O.P.
It never ceases to amaze me that those of a religious bent who set out to convert others seem to think that it is a matter of choice.
In much the same way as you choose which political party to vote for.
Yes I would love for there to be a god who punishes the evil and eternal life in heaven etc.,I’d be pretty strange if I didn’t.
But I cant just turn round and make myself believe something because I want to believe it, though I suspect that there are a hell of a lot of people who do so.
If you offer hard,factual evidence for any belief system then I would have no choice but to believe in that Credo whether or not I wanted to,even if it was a case of cutting the hearts out of thousands of people on top of a pyramid to make sure that the sun came up every morning.
When I was five I was told one morning along with the rest of my class that we were going to see god in the school hall(our first morning assembly).
Even at that age I felt a measure of skepticism but it was mixed with excitement.
Unfortunately if god turned up I never saw him.
In the end, nothing is provable without certain assumptions, such as our senses providing an accurate picture of reality. With those assumptions, god is in the same category as faeries/vampires/ghosts etc. Do you say “Unknown” regarding those too, or just no?
At least openly doing so would have been. I’m sure there always were people who had doubts about the religions embraced by their societies. A lot of them probably went through the motions of observing the local religion and kept their doubts to themselves.
That’s the crux of the issue here, I think. Picking a belief may be near-impossible, but we have a little more control over what we consider to be possible, and beliefs fall into the subset of things we consider possible. It’s a gatekeeper, if you will.
Certainly I can choose what to investigate. I can also choose to engage in activities designed to modify my brain (Hare Krishna chanting, for example). I cannot directly choose to change my conclusions based on the evidence I have before me, not even on the most trivial matters. For example, I had salmon for dinner; I cannot choose to believe I had a hamburger, even though I had one earlier in the week and can imagine it.
If I can’t choose to change such a trivial belief, how would I possibly choose to change a belief about the purpose and meaning of life?
I think there’s a basic level of confusion here (for me, at least); why must one have to make a choice in order to take credit or blame for something?
I take credit and blame for all things which I am, whether they are positive or negative, whether they are a choice or not. To take this to an extreme that it, undoubtedly, will; I have a penis, I take credit for my penis. It wasn’t a choice made for me, by me, or at all. It is simply a product of who I am, or I am (at least in part) a product of that.
