cherry picking and making it up

Here's a page in my journal from about two years ago. I was working out my own personal Godhead. Not a trinity but a quartet: Father, Mother, Son and (female) spirit.
Desperately trying to restructure my belief system to incorporate a little divine feminine influence in a otherwise utterly male hierarchy/power structure.

Also I was re-thinking the after life: The whole three-degrees-of-glory + spirit-world-missionary-work thing just no longer working as the perfect answer I had taught about as a Sunday school teacher ("Isn't God loving? Providing a way for us to be baptized for those who died never hearing about Joseph Smith and the plan of salvation??") A version of re-incarnation, where our "essence" or "soul" or "[whatever?]" continued to be re-born again and again and again until it reached a sort of nirvana, made much more sense.

Eventually the irony of making it up as I went along dawned on me. Picking and choosing what I liked, altering what needed to be altered, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, discarding this, keeping that.

Really just making it up.

Finding myself face to face with the question: "If this is all metaphorical anyhow, what's the point?!?" (And questioning the necessity of the skewers of religion).

One of the points Dawkins makes in The God Delusion when the liberal theologians raise their re-interpreted Divinity is the problem with baggage. That term "God" and what it means in the minds of most believers is really very problematic.

That's what I started wondering about; my own hodge-podged theologies and why I bothered. The only divine entity[ies] that made any sense had not much in them to inspire devotion, adoration, or belief. (etc... )

The end result being the realization that I really didn't believe in the hodge-podged (or otherwise) theologies I was propping up for myself.

But, on a different level, I do so love the picking apart process. A few links on some of my pet topics: BiV's and Kiskilili's thought provoking questions about the Virgin Mary, Kiskilili's and Lynnette's dissection of Eve and the Creation, (BiV also takes on the Creation with an eye to science) and Lynnette on takes on Heavenly Mother. To make a quick segue into SF, have you read Parable of The Sower by Octavia Butler? LOVE Lauren and her earthseed religion.
There's so many others. This is just off the top of my head.

(and now it's outa my head and in print, so maybe I can be productive today....)