Belief is a choice - my experience tells me that people have a need to choose an ideological framework in which to live, and once you are settled into this, it is not hard to ignore other input that contradicts your ideal. I can choose to believe in a lot of things - indeed, my mind generates some kind of belief for everything that I don’t have firsthand experience with. To me the bottom line is that beliefs are empty; they are not necessarily based on truth simply because someone believes them; in fact, the state of belief is used by the mind to fill in a reality when faced with unknowns.