Choosing to/not to Believe? Not Possible?

[drfuzzy]

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.

I believed because I was taught that God exists and Jesus exists and that if you believe and pray you'll go to heaven - from before I was old enough to string a sentence together.  I believed also because 98% of my friends and neighbors held the same belief, and because we went to church 3 times a week (at the minimum), so this was my environment.  This was the way the world was.  A fear element was also included: the world was evil, non-believers were evil, and if you don't pray hard enough or try hard enough to be good you will go to hell and burn forever.  An element of superiority was also there: only WE were good and deserving of heaven because we were smart enough to worship Jesus.

I started questioning these things as a child and was punished.  I started to really question in college, but did not abandon the idea that a loving God could possibly exist at that time.

But after another couple of decades, I started hearing the stories and the sermons and they just STOMPED on logic and decency.  The whole premise was irrational and absurd and ridiculously tribal and abusive.  Not only was there no scientific proof of any deities (in an age when disseminating that proof to the entire globe would take seconds) but the existence  of such a creature seemed pretty unlikely.  And if it did exist, it certainly would bear no resemblance to the monster described in the Torah, Bible, or Koran. 

At this point, belief was no longer a possibility.