Belief

[henryp]

I asked this question in another thread but it seemed to get ignored amongst all the more attention-demanding argumentation that seemed to be galvanizing it, so I'll rephrase the question here, because I'm super curious about the various responses atheists may give.

Basically, can any belief be changed?   I know that most can, but I often wonder whether some people's belief in God is sometimes just unable to be changed, particularly since I've believed in God my whole life and nothing seems to have swayed me out of it.  I will qualify that by saying I was raised in a God-believing family and sustained a belief in God throughout my adult life even though my conception of God's nature/requirements of me have changed.  I've also found most Athiest arguments on God's existence to be far superior to most if not all Theist arguments.  Yet the superiority of arguments do nothing to convince me that my basic belief in God is a flaw.  At worst, it's just a seemingly permanent part of my psychological make up.  Neither good nor bad, just part of me.  So I'm wondering if sometimes, theism is just there permanently, like breathing.  Would be interesting to hear thoughts on this from an atheist's perspective.

Our minds are biased by design, and are trained to take on more biases as we grow older.  What you know intellectually is only a small piece of the puzzle.  Growing up in a religious family, living your whole life with the belief in God, that's not something you can easily shake off.  

I don't know if it's permanently there, but it might as well be at some point.  Particularly, when you likely have no vested interest in not believing in God.  And for many, they reach a tipping point, where they are so invested in the belief in God, they won't let anything change that.

One of the perks of believing in God, is that being wrong doesn't really matter, so there usually is no real imperative to do the hard work to undo that belief, even if you sort of know it's nonsense deep down.  After all, we know lots of things are nonsense, but very frequently, we just carry on anyways.