Choosing to/not to Believe? Not Possible?

[Mister Agenda]

Hey guys! First of all I apologize for not hanging around much since I first joined. Life has been hectic.

This is an honest question as I'm genuinely curious what perspectives you all have on this. I recently read an article where a Christian apologist used the argument to atheists that they "choose not to believe in God". This claim was promptly met by much backlash in the comments, with many athiests claiming that such a thing was impossible.

In fact many of them went on to assert that we do not, and cannot by definition, choose to believe something.

Now this is very interesting to me because I have heard this argument from certain Christian denominations before (namely Calvinism, which I am not of that camp) but from the inverse idea that one cannot choose to believe God because only God can choose us. Now I am a Christian but fall under the Arminianism camp that believes in free will and the ability to choose. This was the first time I had heard a similar argument from the athiest viewpoint.

I'm puzzled by the notion though, because to assert that we do not or cannot choose what to believe is essentially akin to saying that we are incapable of willfully embracing faith (and by proxy, incapable of willfully rejecting a religious belief we've grown up into), no?

This isn't meant to be a challenge or apologetic. I'm honestly intrigued as to what the consensus is here on this.

We can choose to try to convince ourselves of nearly anything, and I'm not sure that there's anything a person cannot convince themselves of if they try hard enough, for long enough. When they finally succeed, they believe what they chose to convince themselves to believe. But they still had to be convinced, even if it was by themselves. They couldn't just flip to the new belief instantly.

For instance, say I lost a bet and therefore had assumed an obligation to start being a theist. I know that community support is conducive to theistic belief, so I would join a church or temple. I know that unsupervised scripture reading is detrimental to theistic belief, so I would only engage in guided study. I might try affirmations, telling myself every day that God is real. I would pray, a lot, in particular for things that I know have a decent chance of happening anyway. I would avoid things that encouraged doubt. Over time, with relationships forged and at least some prayers answered, and an investment of time, effort, and money that would be wasted if I failed to succeed in believing, I might become a believer.

It would be very difficult for me and still might not succeed, because rational skepticism is like an inoculation against having faith in things that lack enough evidence to justify rational belief; and now that I hold the belief that one ought not to believe extraordinary claims without evidence sufficient to overcome the extraordinary nature of the claim; I'm not sure how I would go about getting rid of it. I'm not sure I can if I wanted, barring torture or immanent threat of death.