Is belief really a choice?

[Silver]

can you elaborate on some of them?

What I assume you are seeking is whether I wholeheartedly put myself into the religion, its practices, and gave my heart completely over to what I was believing. The answer to that would be yes.

I was quite the fundamentalist christian, which is why I believe I am so militant as an atheist, and I believed that prayer worked and that there was a god in the sky who listened and answered my prayers. Not that any of them were answered, but I blindly informed myself that no answer was still an answer. I attended church and prayer meetings near the flag pole before school started, I read the bible all the time and for a while I actually believed what was written in it was the truth.

As a Wiccan I was not militant for the fact that the religion believes in karma and the threefold law of harming none unless that harm be returned upon me threefold. I studied spells and wore pentacle pendants, I performed rituals to the goddess, created my own Book of Shadows, and I believed in the goddess just as much as I had previously believed in the christian god. I suppose I chose Wicca because of the female aspect of the religion where the believer could choose whether or not to believe in the pagan male gods. I purposefully chose to only believe in the goddess due to my, at the time, new found dislike for the christian god.

When I began questioning why I was even choosing to believe in religion, when obviously none of it was real as far as prayer or spells were concerned, I chose to become an agnostic and then slowly made my way toward being an atheist simply by shedding those beliefs I had chosen as a theist.