I have a friend who is a devout evangelical Christian who said she was agnostic for many years then she had some kind of experience which I don’t think she explained but became a believer. Why do you think some people turn to God? I think the only thing that would make me believe is if God opened up the ski and cane down before my eyes. I’ve always been highly suspicious of anything I can’t see or touch and even than I’m still highly suspicious of anyone’s intentions.
To me, it would be like going back to believing in Santa Claus again. I do not believe that once you see Truth you can fall back into deceiving yourself. Just weird!
They already had a predisposition toward believing in a God ... a guilt or pressure by others unconsciously to find a reason in believing in their dream of a God.
To me, Religion provides an easy answer explanation to why things happened and why little mini miracles happened. I've seen mini miracles that happened in my life only I could see. It didn't matter which religion I was in and the religious explanation was conditional and controlling mechanisms.
it is very hard to realize what is real and not real based on our own judgment and feeling because we base what we have learned in the past to make future judgment and some of our past interpretations are incorrect it's that is why we used scientific method thought that people can test our model and assumptions and duplicate them to verify it is correct. I hope that makes sense.
Desperation. I lean nearly 100% atheist yet even I may on occasion mutter a prayer to anything that may be listening before opening the fridge to see if there's anything still edible.
In seriousness though sometimes it's just out of habit. Like crossing your fingers.
I can't speak for everyone, and my response is entirely anecdotal, but it seems that a lot of conversion stories are a bit fabricated. I don't mean that they didn't become religious, but they claim to have been an atheist or agnostic when it really wasn't the case. What they really mean, in a few cases I'm familiar with, is that they really never thought much about religion, faith, God, etc., until one day they did (perhaps because of a death in the family or some other trauma or meeting a charismatic preacher). What they seem to be saying is that they just didn't put any stock into what they believed, rather than making a conscious effort to follow the truth, and then they had this conversion to some deep religiosity and consider the life they led previously to be one of sin and godlessness, and they label themselves as atheists or agnostics without really understanding what those terms mean to people who have considered their position far more consciously.
Fear of their own mortality? "Ski and Cane" that does sound like an interesting franchise is it like "Sportchek" and why would god choose to open one when he could just open a televangelist church and fill his greedy desires just as well involved in his business interest, LOL. Too, bad about your friend though, I can't think of anything short of a frontal lobotomy that could turn me into a believer, but then I am an atheist.