Can you choose what to write?
Apparently.

Well yeah ultimately it's a choice, just like so many existing religious individuals who've switched religion. Look that dude who cheats on his wife with balloons. He says they talk to him and get him going. That's what that dude believe.

There are plenty of choices. People seek them out all of the time. When I learned there was no Santa Claus, that was it for me tho I attended many religious institutions as a curiosity. Just don't sign their visitors book or your asking for a visit.

Yes. People do it all the time. And you DID choose to become an atheist. YOU used reason, logic and reliance on evidence to make up YOUR mind.

You could have easily chosen to ignore reason, logic and evidence and continued to be a believer. People do THAT all the time.

You had a choice and you chose. Don't devalue your agency by denying you have it.

I think the latitude that one has in the freedom to choose what to believe and to learn about new "choices" is tempered by the emotional content in the choice. In an intellectual, academic sphere, one can absorb and accept many new ideas. In areas that touch a nerve and fire up emotions - politics, religion, relationships - emotions are more likely to short-circuit logic.

You cannot. Period. @Fernapple is more diplomatic in his response, and it will probably turn less people off than my blunt 'no' by saying "at best". But if you couple what he said, "only chose from the selection offered to you by your brain" with the correct statement @skado made, "People can believe only what they find believable" you can start to get a sense of the truth. You can't choose what propositions enter your conscious mind as options, and you can't choose which of those options your brain doesn't immediately reject as implausible/impossible. You also don't choose the physical or chemical composition of your brain at the point any of these "choices" need to be made. (Nor do you choose to be born, who to be born to, what they believe, how and where they raise you, what they expose you to, etc. People will argue that they eventually get to choose where they live and what they expose themselves to, but...) It's in these options that remain after all that that people believe they have free will. If you look at the science, though, you'll see that there's no room left, so to speak, for free choice.

At best, you can only choose from the selection offered to you by your brain via your own experiences, and those ideas offered to you by your own culture. Which means that the ideas of cultures you have no contact with, and ideas which no one including yourself have ever thought of, are forever off the menu. Which may well be many fundamental truths about the universe.

Another big factor is, that humans are basically lazy. Which is an evolved survival strategy that once helped us to save time and energy, in the days when food was hard to come by, and hunting time consuming. And cowardly, we fear doubt and uncertainty. But those factors mean that, we tend naturally therefore, to prefer short simple answers lacking in nuance and complications.

Yet the universe is we know, complicated and filled with important detail, which means that our in built bias, in favour of simple answers, may well be a bias leading us away from truth and understanding. Even worse we may tend to choose to believe lies rather than truths, because lies can be made up and deliberately engineered to be simple and easy, in order to be favoured by that bias. Being able to choose may not always be helpful.

(I like this, may well post it. Thanks for the inspiration.)

You choose what to believe every day. In fact, every moment of every day. It's all based on choices, which are made by what is most likely to be true (in that individual's head), so your basic premise is flawed. It may feel like determination created your path but it was your determinations based on choices.

Our beliefs (how we see the world) are based on our education and experience.

We can change our beliefs when we get get new information or experience.

I never believed in an invisible being who resides somewhere beyond the clouds. As a young child dropped off at Sunday school, I was highly skeptical. It was clear the Bible is just a book of stories written by men.

Never believed in an invisible god.

You can choose, but unless your mind is very special you're limited by the offering of a choice or the alternatives to choose between.

I believe I can. Yes. As referring to religion, it was more choosing what NOT to believe.

We each have to start somewhere . A lot of people are brain washed as small children as to what are the basics of life . They then build on those basic ideas , and many never question the basics they began with . The further along they progress , the harder it is to return back to the beginning and start over .

I can choose to be happy despite life events that cause people to recoil in horror.
And I chose to remove myself from some of it, at great risk.
I can choose to not become addicted to crap when I noticed had a bent for it.
So yeah, i Choose to be rational.

Good question. I find many believers that claim honestly that they would have the same religion if brought up in other countries where that religion is little known and not practiced. They seem to not have rationality or logic.

Lack of choice? What are you smoking?

If all is determined, no.

People can believe only what they find believable, given what they know, and nobody knows it all.