I have a friend, in fact one of my best of friends, who is an extremely active Caodaist (a local Vietnamese syncretic religion dating from the beginning of the twentieth century stemming from French spiritualism but containing dollops of pretty much every religion around).

He said to me once, at some point you just have to decide whether to believe or not to believe, I have decided to believe and you have decided to not believe.

I see this as a cop-out.  He was raised in this religious system and indoctrinated with it as a child, and so all his instincts cause him to want to believe, and when he believes he is rewarded with feelings of peace and joy and when he doubts he is punished by feelings of guilt and fear and hopelessness.  Our instincts work that way to get us to do what natural selection has wired into us to do, and natural selection has wired us to follow the norms and beliefs of our culture.  In a more primitive environment this is important in the survival of the group.

I think it takes a pretty strong will to override these emotions for intellectual reasons (intellectual honesty and rigor), and not too many people have what it takes, and even those who do usually are burdened most of their lives with residual emotional battles that end up with the person hating the religion of their culture.

Now I see examples of people willing to commit atrocities in the name of their beliefs, and die for them (the notion that a loving God would never expect such a thing from its followers is not rational) and struggle with cognitive dissonances out the kazoo all their lives, just to get the "high" of joy and peace every now and then from succumbing to the instinct.  What a terrible trick evolution has played on us -- in many ways -- this belief trap is just one of them.