If someone is born and indoctrinated into a particular faith, can we really say that their belief in god was a choice? is there a particular point where it becomes a choice, and If it is not a choice, is any type of religious persecution the same as persecuting others for their gender, sexual orientation, etc?
© 2026 – SoulSequel
30 responses to “is belief in god a choice? if belief in god is not a choice, is religious persecution tantamount to sexism or any other ism?”
I have only seen religious persecution in Iran, where (if you are not a Muslim) you have no rights to own property, be educated, have a job, or have any livelyhood. If you practice your religion and it is not Muslim, you will be arrested, placed in prison, and if you still will not convert to the Muslim Faith, then you will be executed in public.
That does not happen in America. We are free to chose as we wish.
I can only speak for the Baha’i Faith. Our religious laws say that a child born of Baha’i parents must learn about all the religions and be educated enough to make a choice at the age of 15. Until the 15 year old makes a choice, they are of no religion. They study about all of the religions. Some choose not to decide until later on in life. Some may test the waters by choosing a religion that is not the same as their parents. The choice is to be respected.
I became Baha’i at 33. I have a hard time believing in a God — Spook-in-the-sky. I have my own ideas about this God business. It is OK, because the Baha’i Faith is not a cookie-cutter religion, and no two need to believe the same. We have prayer books with prayers to read, but I have been doing ONLY that — reading the prayers. It was not until I started living close to Immortal Pirate that I got the full meaning of living in your faith and belief in God. He brought the God concept closer to my heart.
Making a decision??? Yes, I made a decision to get back into the Baha’is and live within my faith. It is a choice. Once I made the choice, and seeing how Immortal Pirate lives his faith, I have grown more accepting of the God that is an unknowable essence.
@ladybarbara I can understand all of that. Just wondering about those who are indoctrinated from a young age and who maybe don’t have the resources to research other beliefs. Maybe it is kinda like love, which begins as a thing that happens and later becomes a choice.
I would think if there is a cut-off, maybe at 12 years old, that would be the break, when one develops the ability to think critically about their own beliefs…
@Scarlett I don’t know anyone who did not have a choice of what religion to follow when they were children. I did not pay attention.
@ladybarbara
There’s currently over 10 thousand Jews living in Iran.
@luftballooneyegouge I lived in Iran for three months and my passport said my religion was Jewish, yet I did not see any Jewish people there. They have to hide their faith. All people who are not Muslim have to hide their faith and worship practices in Iran.
@ladybarbara
They have Synagogues in Iran.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_synagogues_in_Iran
Fake news?
It all depends on what you call choice. According to @griz even atheists have gods, despite the lack of places of worship, closed texts, costumes, music, visual art, drama, sexual experiences/ limitations, prayer, mystic experiences, sermons, even celebratory foods… the list could include anything but the traditional trappings of religious experience, and he would go out of his way to claim all these different things are an expression of the individual’s god. Though i disagree.
It’s all in mindset which isn’t as much of a choice as some matters. If we had a hive mind and could experience everything others did, it’d be different
@Jear77
Actually it goes beyond just @griz to include a growing body of intellectual discourse and psychological literature.
All these things you mention are just “draping” or “props” to help better “handle” the abstract concept of “thing of highest value”.
And even you have one of these.
Perhaps several.
And drape them in various ways so you don’t have to deal with their naked reality, and prop them up in all sorts of ways, and make abundant sacrifices of reason, logic, and intellect.
Try reading some of Jung’s writings on “collective consciousness”. And then consider the concept that what we have classically case as “evil” . . . tend to be those motivators that would drive us away from the ability to connect with others and isolate within ourselves.
Interesting fact: every invention and innovation we take for granted happened within the collective structure. Even those that can seemingly be attached to a particular person. For the greater society — whether eagerly or grudgingly — provided “a space” within it for these things to happen, and/or to become mainstream.
@griz the difference between us is that if some new scientific discovery upturned everything i knew, i’d simply shrug and say cool, science has something new. That’s the strength of using something that is self correcting.
If, on the other hand, a person or people believing in god was shown irrefutable evidence that there was no god or worse yet that the god that existed was an a vastly different one than the texts portrayed it as with the discovery of new rexts, it would shatter their world viewpoint. Could one recover from it? Doubtful.
@Jear77
Only if one’s “strength” . . . was the weakest aspect of the religious process: the adherence to ossified dogma.
I’ve pointed out before that your “religious experience” seemed totally devoid of the Holy Spirit — what Paul called the “living and active” aspect of what has been described as the Trinity.
Consider that of the two of us, you’ve exercise far more zeal to not waver from dead ossified (and mostly mistaken) dogma.
You actively resist altering what you are so convinced is true about the Bible-based belief-system . . . even when the Bible itself actively refutes the stance you’ve taken.
@griz once again, if I am to turn over my life for something that essentially lives outside of time I need INSTANT and IMMEDIATE results, the way I want and need them to be, not what and how and when and where it does. Not one second later. When I say “hey, dude, I need this” there better be no “I don’t want this for you.” “You need to figure this out for yourself,” or “not yet.” I can’t put up with that bullshit my life. I’m far too busy. And things simply won’t work out that way, because that’s not the way things work.
@Jear77
I would suggest the only change in life one could make and achieve instant and immediate positive results from, is to start telling the truth about yourself to yourself.
When all that imprisons the life mind and Spirit of a person are constructs based on fallacies, Freedom can only be found in honest truthful thoughts and truthful speech.
Religions of outrage and victimhood may feel good for a while, such leave one less capable of thinking and speaking truthfully over time. Soon a person’s best truths are but empty fallacy, and genuine truth is seen as toxic.
Because it threatens the very fallacy construct one has come to rely upon.
And the attempt to justify continued imprisonment just grow more and more bizarre over time. It’s like one of those Star Trek energy leach traps.
@griz really? What can it do that is of any worth materially? Raise rhe dead? Cure diseases of diabetes, cancer, AIDS? Give instant wealth? Reverse the problems of aging? Feed the hungry? Clothe the naked? Give wealth? If it can’t do any of the above, i’m not particularly interested. Remember, you’re talking about a deity who speaks reality into being. An attitude adjustment should be able to get something of those magnitudes.
@Jear77sure, I don’t agree with the concept, but I follow.
There is a “darker” intellectual side to this issue in that the classic traditional “God concept” turns out psychologically to just be something akin to “the highest ideal or value” . . . or even the very transcendent process of LIFE.
And psychopathy aside, everyone MUST have one of these. Even the staunchest anti-theist or most dismal nihilist.
Many of the classic “religions” have simply attached something akin to “clothing” so they don’t have to face the naked reality of the concept — and “handles” so they can get a better grasp on it.
This also gets around the natural tendency to degrees of megalomania in maintaining “highest value and ideal” as something beyond self that must be constantly risen to.
(But this in no way dodges the issue that any religiously-held ideology can spin dark and tyrannical if they become too ossified in dogma, exercised with increasingly intolerant and totalitarian fervor — at which point they need to be either re-vivified or put in a box on the shelf as not a part of healthy society . . . as we have with nazism and hopefully will soon do with marxism.)
I would repeat that we need to be VERY awake and conscious to the danger presented by group-victimhood thinking (marxism). It strikes at the very root of Western Society by removing individual accountability.
While it’s not easy to examine and epistemologize one’s beliefs, I hold that anyone who wants to consider themselves intellectually “conscious” needs to do this.
And anyone who doesn’t runs the ludicrously high risk of becoming just a programmed ideologue — a sort of addict to the “good feelings” that every belief, value-structure or hierarchy “rewards” its “players” with.
Descriptors like addict, zombie, puppet, owned, slave, and possessed would not be out of place.
And I don’t think we can apply “ism” or group victimhood ideology (marxism) in such cases without celebrating and endorsing addictions, incompetency, the absence of deeper thought and consciousness, slavery and possession.
@griz yeah, I am not really sure what happened here, but you and I could not be further apart in our beliefs. Addiction is housed in the brain. DNA plays. a factor, so I could take a particular substance and be fine. You could take the same substance and become addicted to it. I feel like people need to educate themselves on the science of addiction more, and show people who have that issue compassion and kindness.
Again, I think we are going to have to agree to disagree on whether or not racism etc is a real thing.
@Scarlett
I’m a little confused over how this came to addiction, and why you think I would disagree with the premises you make about it above. (I’m fatigued and a little stressed, so I may have lost the theme of the conversation).
Addiction is both a physiological and psychological condition and of course exists in the brain. And the link to DNA is that we have evolved to habituate to behaviors causing a serotonin surge. While many things from sex to learning to being a winner can cause this, chemical substances excel at it. They very powerfully co-opt the dopamine response (remember that I am still learning about this).
A substance you are “fine with” that another becomes addicted to, is likely just a matter of threshold. Both genetic and environmental factors can leave one more susceptible than the other has any given point in time. But given the right set of circumstances a substance one may have been “fine “with for decades, can suddenly manifest as a classic addiction.
I don’t think I have ever said “isms” are not real, because I know for a fact that they are and likely always will be no matter how we try to rewrite the rules or reorder the society. They are linked to the familiarity attraction/novelty avoidance in trait-conservatives, and how this tends to totally flip flop in trait- liberals.
What I have said is that trying to use them as our primary perceptual structure unto cultural Marxism (victimhood ideology), has always lead to tribalism oppression and bloodshed.
Even while purporting to be in the name of addressing tribalism oppression and bloodshed.
Tens of millions in this last century alone were massacred for their religious beliefs.
History is full of examples of people being persecuted for their beliefs.
Every cross you see is a sign of a man who was murdered for his beliefs.
Assuming someone was born in a religion because they have beliefs is incorrect.
The problem I see in American society is you have the far right religious folks who clearly are nothing like Jesus, but exactly like the sort who murdered Jesus put up as authoritative.
By their own selves, and by critics of Jesus.
The two work together to deny Christ and his true person and teachings.
@five2one sorry, not following what you mean…
@Scarlett “If someone is born and indoctrinated into a particular faith, can we really say that their belief in god was a choice? is there a particular point where it becomes a choice, and If it is not a choice, is any type of religious persecution the same as persecuting others for their gender, sexual orientation, etc?”
True belief in God is not a choice, it is an awakening. The One who chooses is God, not humans. The humans are made, ‘the nothings of this world’ are chosen to ‘shame the strong’. But, the vast numbers you see and hear from are obviously fake.
This is why, partly, so much clearly written statements were made of them: ‘Babylon’, ‘the False Prophet’, ‘the Beast’, and many statements across the Prophets and Apostles.
The ministry of Jesus is not difficult to read and finish, and not something anyone in the West is truly unfamiliar with, enough so, anyway, that even lifelong atheists know these followers are fake and very opposite of Jesus.
We who are nothings of this world respond to the sermon that tells us we will have our day. Because we grew up and lived in an environment where we were the outcasts. We live in a world where we are outsiders.
Who are our worst persecutors? The religious people who are fakes.
I do not think your post sees those who believe in God. Instead, as is frequently the case, people see those fakes and accept their claim to being like Jesus and servants of Jesus. So, it has been for two thousand years.
So, yes, we do have rights, and we should have those rights.
But, the whole system is designed against us.
Satan is not the enemy of the fakes or the people of this world. We are. And Satan, the prince of this world, is our enemy.
Persecution is just about always, attempts to homogenize people into reflections of the persecutor.
@luftballooneyegouge not all homogenization is bad. If everyone were truly a unique individual, society couldn’t function. Yet too much conformity is a bad thing because at some point it becomes boring. What would happen if we always had the same tastes? While it might be easier to determine market, the number of businesses would shrink due to there being too much supply and not enough demand.
@Jear77
I never made that claim.
The humans race is indeed truly made up of unique individuals, & society still functions more or less.
Does it function well? That’s a subjective subject.
Fuck the religion of the Game of Markets.
@luftballooneyegouge amid the uniqueness, there is a lot of conformity to avoid problems or even death.. Even the staunchest non-conformist will still wear some manner of clothes, eat with silverware / chopsticks, and drive on the right side of the road.
@Jear77
….thanks for clearing that up.
@luftballooneyegouge sarcasm, much?
@Jear77
@luftballooneyegouge I feel like belief in a god may not always be a choice, just like anything else imposed on us when we were born, but does it become a choice at some point? What would the criteria be to be able to say it was a true choice? Since we all have different access to resources, both internal and external, is it ever fair to persecute someone for their religious beliefs. So, yes, I think I agree with what you say.
@Scarlett
they might never be exposed to the concept of religion.
I think for some, religion becomes a choice. For some, the idea of choosing might never come up. For a few raised by wolfs, apes, and/or secret science labs
I don’t know how one would specify a generalized metric to measure if they’re being honest with themselves. I think the best tool we have is talking it out with others, but that doesn’t necessarily filter out misconceptions & misunderstandings, and those we bounce our concepts off of, might not always bounce the ball straight back to us, but instead send us off chasing….
@luftballooneyegouge Tyrants are self focused, and perhaps, ironically, they have no soul. Killing Eve, “I think, when people die, they do not fly away, but turn endlessly inward”.
The more one focuses on things, the less soul one has. And the more you want to make everyone else on your same level.