Identifying the word of god

[Esquilax]

ShaMan. For me, as with the faith I have, I would always take small steps and check things against reality and against conscience. So I would allow the book to challenge me, but then I would check the results of such challenge against my conscience and against the real experience of my life. Questions I might reflect on are....

Does the book speak to my life and the life I see around me? Is its guidence in line with my conscience? Has it helped me to dig deeper into my conscence? Where have others found inspiration in its pages? Where am I most unsure of its guidence and what is it that makes me wary of it? Where might have it led others astray, and do I need to be careful of interpretatation or do I need to reject it outright? Could I be reading a mixture of 'good' and 'bad', and if so can I learn from the good and set aside the bad? How does the text compare to wisdom found elsewhere - does it point to, or contradict, widely held truths? And finally, and perhaps most importantly, what small step can I take to then reflect on?

Bolding mine.

Don't get me wrong when I ask this, as I do find your discernment on these issues to be positive, but it does lead me to a question: doesn't there come a point, when you're fact checking the tenets of a religion and holding them up to your own morality first to see if they fit, where you've stopped following "god's word" in the spirit it was intended and have just started following your own convictions, while phrasing them in divine language? I mean, one would think that a divinely authored, inerrant book wouldn't require that sort of thinking, that it'd be an all-or-nothing sort of deal, right?

If you're taking the good and rejecting the bad, aren't you really just assigning your own morality to things, and then shopping out the credit for the good you do to someone else?