God, are you up there?

I've been coming in contact with a decent amount of material lately involving religion. Some for it, some against it. Being an atheist, I have the much easier task of taking on religions many anomalies and fallacies, as compared to that of a theist who's job is to poke holes in rigorously constructed scientific facts that even without complex lab experiments, most lay people could figure out by observation alone. None the less, I relish the opportunity to do so.

The particular thought I've been toying around with this the idea of "lite" believers. By this, I mean anyone on a continuum of people who identify with a certain established religion (or cult too, I guess), but choose certain elements to ignore based on personal belief, or cultural values. I'm not going to spend a lot of time going over all the situations where even extremists such as Jerry Falwell, and other lie spewing bigots interpret the bible to their liking, but suffice it to say, there are plenty of resources out there. If, for example, you ask just about any of your friends if they follow such teachings as putting to death anyone who works on a Sunday, pretty much across the board you will find they say no (or so I hope).

Now I myself have my own unprovable theories about the nature of existence, the universe, and so on, but apart from the fact that for the most part I keep it to my goddamn self, I have also reached those conclusions independently. The problem I have with people who ascribe to only bits and pieces of, say, Christianity and toss out the parts about killing your daughters if they talk back to you, is that you arn't really Christian. If the bible is the exact word of god and defying the word of god is a bad thing, you HAVE to accept the entire book, and nobody really does.

So what are these people doing? They are coming to their OWN conclusions about what life is all about. They are picking parts that make sense and those that don't, which, compared to buying everything said in the book, is actually a refreshing step forwards intellectually. But still the point remains, that they arn't actually christian. They are their own hybrid and individualized belief system. So why not just take it a step further? Why accept that the God they have been taught from the same book they follow so selectively anyway, is actually the progenitor of the universe? It seems a small leap to take from being, say, a Catholic who never goes to church and doesn't really believe the stories in the bible as anything more than moral lessons, to sitting down with yourself, THINKING, and coming up with some own theories. And as long as you are doing that, you could look at some scientific articles, magazines or books, that some of the most intelligent people on the planet have written about just that topic.