Atheists, tell me, a Roman Catholic: why should I become an atheist?

[robvalue]

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Belief is not a choice. No one (unless they are crazy) can simply toggle their beliefs on and off. We base our beliefs, or lack of, or beliefs to the contrary, on evidence of some sort. What counts as evidence to each person, and how convincing it is, varies wildly. But each person has reasons for their beliefs. You can't make those reasons disappear because you want to believe something different. A change in belief requires new evidence, a re-assessment of the current evidence, or a revision of the methods used to assess evidence. (Screwing with your brain directly could of course alter your beliefs, for example with surgery or drugs.)

You can of course pretend to believe whatever you want.

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And of course, as I always find myself saying, without a falsifiable definition for God, there can't even be any evidence. There are just rationalising arguments and baseless assumptions.

I think God is falsifiable.

If nothing exists, then god is false (who is necessary being).

So you've just married existence with God, by definition. So all you're really saying is that if something exists, something exists. If nothing exists, nothing exists. That's a tautology, and you've added nothing to it by assuming God to be necessary and interchangable with existence.

To be useful, it needs to be falsifiable in a way we can somehow test. I can't run a test to see if stuff exists. Obviously, it does, if I'm even here to run the test. So it can't be falsified.

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Belief is not a choice. No one (unless they are crazy) can simply toggle their beliefs on and off. We base our beliefs, or lack of, or beliefs to the contrary, on evidence of some sort. What counts as evidence to each person, and how convincing it is, varies wildly. But each person has reasons for their beliefs. You can't make those reasons disappear because you want to believe something different. A change in belief requires new evidence, a re-assessment of the current evidence, or a revision of the methods used to assess evidence. (Screwing with your brain directly could of course alter your beliefs, for example with surgery or drugs.)

You can of course pretend to believe whatever you want.

And of course, as I always find myself saying, without a falsifiable definition for God, there can't even be any evidence. There are just rationalising arguments and baseless assumptions.

I think we're sacks of bio-matter that works through some very definable chemical reactions.
As such, each of us is going to believe whatever their bio-makeup "decides". "We" don't evaluate evidence.... our brains do... our brains, in their pre-determined, but ever changing and adapting Neural Network, does it all without any awareness being required.
We then become aware of our beliefs... the decisions made in our brain.

And some of us are equally pre-determined to be spreading out those beliefs, some are pre-determined to be imposing them on children, some are pre-determined to not care, some are pre-determined to get other brains to understand how beliefs work.
All those provide information for other brains to work on and come to their own conclusions... knowing full well that any pre-conceived conclusion is far more difficult to correct than any newly formed one.

Absolutely. I'm increasingly of the opinion that "consciousness" is just a series of stories "we" tell ourselves to rationalise what has already been decided and acted upon by the subconcious. It's theatre.

But even if we assume we have real conscious decisions to make, flipping between belief states is not one of them. That's way above our security clearance. Imagine how dangerous it could be if we could do that. "I believe cars can't hurt me!"

Maybe it's telling that some religious people talk about beliefs as if they are choices. This suggests that they're just professing to believe certain things. If they truly believe them, there is no choice involved.