@watson387@sopuli.xyz @King@blackneon.net @lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world

Not everyone who believes in entities and deities (and you're assuming gendered pronouns and, by extension, unknowingly reinforcing the Abrahamic machismo whenever you use the masculine noun "god" to describe any deity/entity being worshipped by a worshipper, ignoring that there are Goddesses and feminine spirits as well, such as Pomba-giras, Lilith, Shakti, Kali, Morana, Morrigan, Santa Muerte, Ereshkigal, Hekate, Isis, Sekhmet, Bastet, Naunet, Babalon, among countless other feminine entities and Goddesses) does so out of being convinced by someone else.

To use my own experience as an example, I began worshipping an unified and syncretic Dark Mother Goddess without being convinced by anyone else. At that time, I used to be a member of a Luciferian sect, whose worshipping was centered around the male aspects of Lucifer, not the feminine aspects of Lilith, for example. Unexpectedly even to myself, I got this uncanny call of a powerful feminine spiritual energy who suddenly took me like a thousand hurricanes and became the epicenter of my entire existence, even though it happened to the disapproval of the Luciferian sect I was part of. I left the sect and, since then, I've been following a very personal (and quite lonely) syncretic belief system built of entities and concepts borrowed from and based upon several different systems, none of which I really belong to.

So, tl;dr: not everyone who believes in entities and deities does so out of being convinced by others, in fact, some (like me) even does so against any convincing from others, out of strange phenomena such as gnosis and synchronicity. Perhaps She is the one convincing me, thus validating your point about "one being convinced to believe"? Maybe... but humans aren't the ones convincing in this specific situation.