I think you can actively choose to fall in love, though it might take some work on your part. As for rotted meat, it’s a matter of exposure. Plenty of people who gagged on Hakarl or Kiviak the first time they tried it have taught themselves to like it.
Sorry, I made an intellectual choice not to believe. Don’t believe me if you don’t want to (it’s your choice) but I remember exactly when it happened.
To try to just answer the OP as simple as possible…
The Bible has then become “The Big Book of what NOT to do”
and i think that people would run around not doing anything it said in it since
it’s basically saying do this stuff and win torture for eternity.
Basic human nature kind of says screw that.
Could you, or someone who’d had a similar experience, chose to believe again, despite the examination of the evidence, if it was desirable for some other reason? Say a person with that experience met someone they wanted to spend their life with, and that person was a strong believer and it would be more comfortable to be able to honestly say “Yes, I too believe”.
Those are choices to try to change your own perception, and they are not guaranteed to work.
This is going to be really rude, but I’m going to doubt your personal experience of your own mind.
I suspect that what you perceived as a choice to not believe, was actually an acknowledgement of the fact you had already ceased to believe. It was the conscious and emotive parts of your mind declaring that they accepted your existing doubts and would no longer attempt to fight them using various tools of denial and cognitive dissonance. But while such a decision would doubtless be very freeing, it remains the case that the actual beliefs themselves, the analytical conclusions of your experiences and knowledge to that point, did not change at the moment of your decision. They may have changed shortly prior to your decision based on other factors, perhaps prompting you to consciously choose how to react to your new doubts - or perhaps your belief had been broken long before and it took you a long time to accept it. But in either case I do not believe that a person can change how their own mind processes data via mere fiat.
Similarly, I don’t believe that a person can simply decide to feel love or to like rotten meat. A person can attempt to alter their situation to facilitate such changes - spending more time with the person and focusing on their good points, or by stuffing piles of the offending foodstuffs into your gullet, but in either case you’re changing the situation your mind is in, not changing your emotions or preferences directly.
Not against the evidence, but I could easily believe again if there was new evidence.
We’ve had threads about what kind of miracles would cause you to believe. Many atheists seem to reject any possible evidence for a god, no matter how convincing, but I would be skeptical but could see myself admitting I had been wrong.
Now if you say evidence forces belief, look how many people see the evidence and still reject it. (Like pretty much any Creationist.) So I don’t think change of belief is forced by evidence without ones choice.
Not rude at all.
Now, I was never fanatically religious, so it was not a wrenching experience for me. But back then atheism was not discussed. I not only got bar mitzvahed but I stayed in Hebrew School after, when I could have easily left. I went to High Holy day services with my father willingly. My experience with religion was pretty positive.
I never got taught anything scientifically implausible. My worldview back then was that God existed, we started with Abram, Moses existed, and the later Bible was reasonably historical.
Back then there were few or no new atheism books (this was 1968,) and the local paper published stuff at Easter saying everyone knew Jesus was real. (This was Queens, not the Bible Belt.)
Pretty much anyone not believing kept quiet about it. I now realize my grandfather, who died when I was 12, was an atheist but this was never mentioned and any oddities seemed to be from him wanting to be American. (He was born in Russia.)
All this blather is to indicate that I was not trembling on the verge of atheism or even doubt. I didn’t open that Bible out of doubt or religious fervor - it seemed interesting and none of the Bibles in our house had introductory material.
My reaction was exactly like understanding something in algebra. I never noticed the two stories of the creation before. I never noticed that the Torah is never mentioned in Judges or Kings. The historical Bible makes sense now. I might have struggled more if I were a spiritual person, and needed to believe, but I also could have rejected the evidence as so many do.
If you think that any change like this is predetermined and not a matter of choice, then fine. But I was not working up to it in any way.
As it happens I do believe the universe is functionally deterministic - but that’s beside the point. 
My position is more that the conscious mind isn’t the instigator or arbiter of things like belief, emotion, or preference. There is more to the mind than that and we don’t have direct conscious control over it - the best we can to is try to feed ourselves influences that will impact the wider brain’s cognition and indirectly influence it to change its behavior.
For example if you are angry you can force yourself to physically relax, force your thoughts away from what’s angering you, and forcibly distract yourself - but you can’t just flip a mental switch and instantly become happy. And similarly I can’t flip a switch and instantly gain a fanatical devotion to scientology.
Sure. My subconscious, for instance, can program really well. When I was working I’d read the Dope and chunks of code would pop out, ready to type in.
But most sane people can override their subconscious also.
Well I can believe three impossible things before breakfast.
I’m not saying that being able to choose means you can choose to believe any damn thing. But you can, for example, choose not to read anything which goes against your preconceptions, or you can choose to read more widely. Or you can expose yourself to something randomly. As I said, lots of religious people saw the same input I did and kept believing. I was under no pressure to change my mine, I was alone when this happened, and could easily have rejected the input. But I chose to pay attention, and I chose to find out more. I’ve chosen to investigate this on line for over 40 years now.
Surely we all have had impulse from our subconscious about things and have chosen to act on some and not acted on others. If that isn’t choice, I don’t know what is. And I accept that some people think choice does not exist. I think it can’t be proven, so I act as if I have choice just like I act like an unprovable deistic god does not exist.
Hello, fellow programmer!
Given that the subject at hand is whether one can choose beliefs (in a rather odd thread where the belief in question gets you the axe) and since emotions have also come up, I disagree, if you’re talking about just deciding to change the belief/emotion and claiming that the decision alone is sufficient to implement the change.
That’s not impressive - every theist I know does that. 
Er, I believe I explicitly said that if you want to change your beliefs this is how you’d do it: “feed ourselves influences that will impact the wider brain’s cognition and indirectly influence it to change its behavior”.
No two people have the same input as each other, and no two people have the same starting mental states. And when you’re talking about things like whether you choose to pay attention, mental state matters at least as much as input.
Unlike what we feel and believe and prefer, what we act on is definitely within the realm of conscious choice. Yes, I believe in conscious choice (and determinism too, at the same time! I’m a fun guy) - I just don’t think that beliefs, feelings, and preferences are with the domain of it.
I have read several articles by people who used to have faith, was convinced by evidence that they were wrong, and wish they could go back to have faith again. Some of them strongly desire their faith back. But you can’t choose to go back.
And that some people aren’t convinced by the evidence doesn’t mean they chose to believe, it means they weren’t convinced. Maybe they made a choice to seek out contrary evidence. Maybe they just don’t have the capacity to understand the evidence. Maybe they are wired so that faith trumps evidence and logic. What I don’t believe is that anyone was convinced by the evidence and then went “Hmm. Should I stop believing, or keep believing?”
Must have missed that. This is a choice, right? Though I didn’t seek out evidence against my belief, I stumbled upon it.
Absolutely. That is why I think free will is untestable. Decisions depend on mental states, and we can never have enough access to them to predict a decision in real time.
Since we act in large part on our emotions, this might be a dilemma for you.
This applies to beliefs, not emotions. Since emotions are at least partially hormonal, and are driven by things outside the brain, I’m fine with saying you can’t create emotions, only control them. (Sometimes.) But beliefs are more intellectual.
If you’ve ever seen a thread started by a drive-by creationist or fundamentalist, you’ll have seen a significant lack of knowledge of the evidence.
Why? They might be too stupid to understand it. Or they might have been told that their churches view is all they need to see, and they are not good enough at critical thinking to see the holes. In large part they are driven by another agenda - perhaps they are scared that they will get rejected by their community, or convinced that nonbelievers go to hell.
Kind of like a climate change denying politician. He could be too stupid to understand the science, or not want to lose oil company donations.
But none of these things force belief. They are just reasons for it.
Of course it’s possible. People do it all the time. It’s probably more common than the alternative, because most people don’t have enough available evidence (or the capability of evaluating it) to really believe anything based on reasoned argument. Do people believe the Earth is round because they’ve worked out how horizons or eclipses or orbital mechanics works? No, they believe it because they choose to trust the people and books that say the Earth is round.
It’s easy to choose to believe anything; you just mentally discredit the people saying one thing, give credence to people saying another thing, and isolate yourself from evidence and arguments that might send you in the wrong direction. It just takes patience and repetition.
Obviously, this is not to say that all belief is of this nature. Real scientific belief exists and isn’t possible to change on a whim. But that’s not how typical human belief works.
That’s a great example. Besides that, most people saw evidence of a flat earth (a prairie, say) and few saw evidence of a round one, or understood it. I’m old enough to remember when early high altitude aircraft (like the X-15) saw the curvature of the Earth and this was considered exciting.
Right. Personal experience generally trumps outside evidence. But so does trust in a family member or friend. People believe in a round earth because there is a critical mass of people that believe in it, not because they carefully examined the evidence–to the extent it’s even available.
The high heritability of beliefs–whether religious, political, scientific, or folk (including even very simple things like appropriate remedies for colds)–also strongly suggests that beliefs are chosen. Most people choose to believe in the same things their parents did. And if they change those beliefs, as often as not it’s because they moved to a new environment where others hold those new beliefs.
One can’t change beliefs instantly, but they can be changed just as someone can learn a new language. Exposure is the most important element.
I’m a social constructionist, so I fall firmly on the side that beliefs and even the nature of reality itself are social constructs. The reality is that almost no one is truly thinking about why they believe anything (and when I talk about beliefs, I’m not just talking about transcendental beliefs, but even things like ‘I am sitting on a chair.’ ‘I own a dog.’ ‘The sky is blue.’) Even the most hard-core physicist is taking it as given that scientific realism is a true path to objective truth (most likely without even knowing what scientific realism is and having no idea that that’s what he believes in the first place) and at best, that’s a completely unproven assertion and at worst, it’s a complete falsehood. The only people that are really, truly thinking about it are philosophers and they don’t have a clue as to what’s really going on (not that I don’t give them kudos for trying.) Our limited perceptions and by nature fallible and incomplete logical faculties and knowledge base likely make such pronouncements on ‘true reality’ impossible (An interesting thought experiment is to think, “How would a slug figure out the universe?” The answer is probably not so well. Any construction that a slug makes about the nature of reality we are likely to consider seriously fundamentally flawed and it would likely be so simplistic that it would be very hard for us to even understand what it was on about, probably something like ‘Tomato=good. World=Leaf. Me like sex.’ There’s no reason to think on the continuum of intelligence that we are closer to the absolute limits of intelligence than we are to a slug. We have created a progressivist mindset where we are the pinnacle of intelligence, but we do so just out of lack of comparison. If there was a scale of ability to use logic between 1-a slug and 100-a theoretical omniscient, totally logical being, we have no idea if we’re a 3 or a 90. We like to think that we’re in the 90s somewhere, but maybe we’re all 4s and it’s just everything else we’ve encountered is a 2 or 3 so we think we’re mega-geniuses. We’re valedictorians in a class of 2 and maybe that means we’re geniuses, but maybe it means that Jim Bob is a dolt. A theoretical 99 may look at our pitiful attempts at understanding reality and be nearly incapable of even understanding our idiocy. I digress.) So what do we do? We can’t sit around staring at the wall in existential crisis (I guess we can, but it’s not very healthy. I’ve been there, not such a fun place. Thank God for Kierkegaard. 
), so we take our cues from everyone else and muddle along. We create mutually pleasing realities that we don’t actually know have anything to do with truth, we just know that everyone around us agrees with us, so we call our constructions useful and largely cease to think about it (Although in honesty, we never really think about them in the first place to even question their veracity or to call them useful. We simply take them as given because no one else seems to question them either. We’re slugs-we don’t ponder the tomatoes; we just eat them.)
One chooses how they act, up to and including which books they read and which podcasts they turn on. They do not choose how their brain reacts to whatever information it is fed.
Think of it this way - you’re constructing an equation to prove whether god exists - with numbers! There are three books in front of you. One book is labeled “numbers that prove god”, one is named “numbers that disprove god”, and one is named “a guide to more correctly doing god belief math”.
You have the free choice which books (if any) to read - though sometimes you might be walking along, stumble, and find yourself falling facefirst upon/into one of them. But barring that sort of accident you have conscious control over the kind of input you consume: which numbers you have, and your skill in adding them up.
But that process itself, the mental process of adding up the numbers, is largely out of your control. You can (maybe) convince your subconscious not to do it at all, or you can deliberately focus on doing it, but you do not have control over how the numbers add up for you. That’s a product of the math, and the numbers you have on hand to work with.
So by reading those books you can deliberately influence how your belief will go, but if problematic numbers get into your head they will influence the result regardless of your choices. Until you manage to forget about those numbers or swamp them with numbers from the other book, anyway.
Never say never - people predict what I’m going to choose to do all the time. (Why we keep going to restaurants where I only like one thing I’ll never know - oh wait, it’s the others like those places and one thing is enough I suppose.)
No dilemma at all! Emotions, as they relate to the decision making process, permute that process. They alter how you do the math - how you weight various factors, your ability to make more complex deductions, and what shortcuts your thoughts take to get a decision made quicker.
And you can’t control emotions directly - though you can control which actions you take based on them. Specifically, by reminding yourself to continue giving “don’t punch annoying babies because morals/consequences” proper weight, despite the emotion telling you that’s unimportant because crying crying always crying.:mad:
That’s something you can do without believing in God, really. Where you are or have been cruel, indifferent, selfish, lazy, hurt others by commission or omission – you can admit it, atone to the degree possible, and move on.
A belief in God assists in this movement toward spiritual health, in large part because the knowledge that you are understood, loved, and forgiven despite the awful things you may have said, thought, and done, and the good you could have but failed to do, does buoy you up while you face your particular dark side.
Personally I don’t give any thought to what happens after I die, it isn’t a factor in my life as a Christian at all. Not a Baptist, apparently.