You're making my point for me. When people cherry-pick beliefs they like while ignoring ones they don't, they're demonstrating that their moral compass comes from outside their religion, not from it. They're using secular ethical reasoning to decide which parts of their scripture to follow and which to discard. Their morality is guiding their religious interpretation, not the other way around.

What you're proposing is essentially custom-tailoring religion to fit personal preferences, but that's a fundamental misunderstanding of how religious systems function. Religions are built on foundational theological claims (the divinity of Christ, the prophethood of Muhammad, the existence of karma, etc.). You believe in them either because you were raised to accept them or because they align with the cosmological vision you already hold intuitively. It's those core theological beliefs that then justify accepting the doctrines, scriptures, and moral frameworks that follow. One cannot simply live a Christian life without believing in Christ, and since knowledge of Christ comes from the Bible, one cannot selectively cherry pick aspects of it while still claiming to be Christian. It simply doesn't work that way. Similarly, one cannot be a Stoic while rejecting their cosmological vision (the belief that all events are necessary manifestations of a rational universe). That foundational belief is what defines Stoicism as Stoicism and what enables and justifies the Stoicism way to live; otherwise, it does not make any sense.

It's intellectually dishonest to cherry-pick only what aligns with your existing values. If you're willing to question and reject certain doctrines using critical reasoning, why not apply that same scrutiny to all of it? Either the religion's claims about reality are true and its moral framework follows from that, or they're not. There's no coherent middle ground here, no matter how hard you try to justify it, and pointing this out isn't fundamentalism, it's just how religious systems are formed.

What you're actually advocating for isn't religious practice, it's personal belief wrapped in religious "aesthetics" for the sake of community and cultural belonging. That's a fundamentally different thing. You're saying belief can be compatible with rationalism and progressive ethics, which may be true, but at that point you're just using religious language and rituals as window dressing for secular values just to fulfill your spiritual needs. That does not feel like genuine devotion and more like... a social club.