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 "What makes a free thinker is not his beliefs, but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought, he finds a balance of evidence in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem." 

Bertrand Russell, "The Value of Free Thought: How to Become a Truth-Seeker and Break the Chains of Mental Slavery" (1944) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), pp. 239-40.

The statement above is important because it is not about whether a person may come to conclude, and therefore chooses to believe, that there is a god of one sort or another. Indeed, "however odd his conclusions may seem" means a person is as free to believe or not believe in a God as they see fit. 

 The trouble is when they have reached their conclusion and then decides that everyone else around them must accept the same conclusion, and failing to do so is a mortal threat to their eternal soul. 

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