Heaven and The Problem of Evil

[Esquilax]

Belief is the same way. You can't turn it off and turn it on. It just doesn't work like that. Did you sit down one day and decide to believe in your god? Or, did you come to belief as the result of many different considerations leaving you thinking that it was the best, or only, way to go? Could you make the honest and conscious decision to stop believing in your god tomorrow? To be fully and completely honestly certain that he is just a fictional character?

Of course not.

Does anyone else feel the irony in the fact that the people most likely to characterize belief as a choice are also the ones who say that everyone knows in their hearts that the christian god is real, and those who say they don't believe are just being stubborn?

There's two ways one can take that: one would be to focus on the double standard ("beliefs are choices except for this god one." ) but more likely its a symptom of a much more telling problem for religious apologetics. Namely, that its more focused on the profession of beliefs, than the beliefs themselves. This pops up quite a bit, too much to be coincidence: Pascal's Wager does it, this "you know in your heart," shit does it, "the fool has said there is no god," does it... How many religious arguments are focused on either keeping you in line with christian behaviors regardless of your actual beliefs, or neutralizing the credibility of dissent?

It's about making everyone toe the party line, nothing else.