Would you surrender your own beliefs in the cause of doctrinal unity?
Doctrinal unity is one ideal. But then there's the matter of simply getting it right. If you tell us our beliefs on such things as the creation are going to determine whether we have a good afterlife or a bad afterlife, then it seems important to get it right. People used to be killed for not getting it right.
The rich man was told he had to choose between his wealthy lifestyle or his eternal salvation. There was no addendum that let him maintain his own beliefs and still be saved.
If so, who should decide what those beliefs should be?
Indeed, who? You've reserved the right to decide for yourself how much Christianity to believe. Yet when we make that same decision for ourselves, somehow you say God has a problem with that. Seems like special pleading.
On the matter of God's alleged corporeality:
I would say, Yes. But that's just my opinion.
The physical nature of God seems to be something that's important to get right. You've managed to commit a heresy in all of Catholicism, Judaism, Protestantism, and Evangelicalism. Once again, the only major sect that agrees with you is (drum roll) the Mormons. But you still refuse to talk about whether the Christian God has his naughty bits intact.
Just as there were Christians before there was a New Testament, there were Jews before there was an Old Testament. And they all followed widely varying oral traditions. They didn't worship only YHWH, but also the various gods of the surrounding regions. These were all corporeal gods that looked like people. YHWH was also a corporeal god. They all had magical powers, but they also all had naughty bits—some of them, very prodigious naughty bits because fertility was a big part of believing in gods back then. And they had male and female naught ybits because there were both gods and goddesses.
When early Jewish elders and scholars (not Moses) started to assemble the Torah, there was no One True oral tradition that prevailed. The first creation account is in the priestly tradition. The second is in the Yahwist tradition. They are
vastly different, specifically on how and when humans were created. These accounts corresponded to geographic distinctions. When the goal is to unite the nation, you don't necessarily want to blend them together and lose the essence of both, and thus the cohesion you're trying to create. Each tradition can point to the Torah and say, "Yep, our preferred version is preserved in holy writ."
But all traditions are much, much older than the first attempts to write them down and codify them. As such, they are polytheistic. "Let us create..." was not just a narrative device. It was a full-blown design committee. And the "image of God" problem was solved as far as the naughty bits went. Humans were created with male and female genitals because the gods and goddesses had male and female genitals. Those deities were, among other things, fertility symbols. They were created in the image of the gods because the gods looked like humans. That's why I said was important for you to tell me whether God had male genitals. It tells me how faithful you are to the original stories.
The transition from a corporeal humanoid pantheon to a single incorporeal spirit began with the destruction of the temple and continued into Judaism's encounters with Greek thought. But doing so required them to basically redefine certain words in the creation accounts to mean exactly the opposite of their original literal meaning. This is what happens when you decide what you want to believe and then try to shoehorn it into your canon. It's basically ordinary philosophy with a smattering of cherry-picked, badly-interpreted scripture. The reformulation of God to be a generic omnipresent mist of righteousness is a very late addition to all these stories and traditions, and it really cannot be squared with the source materials, or even logically with itself. It's so easy to get theists all tied up in knots in their shoelaces as they try to tap dance through a Neo-Platonic minefield of inconsistency.
The problem comes when religionists try to have it both ways. God's ways are allegedly higher than man's ways, and God must be obeyed if we are to be saved. Therefore if God tell us to do something mean like persecute gays or kill Muslims in order to be saved, we don't have a choice. It may seem horrible by human standards, that's just too bad. The religionist's conscience is sacrosanct, and doing undesirable things like persecuting his fellow beings or selling all his possessions is just the price he pays for his faith. He's compelled to inconvenient obedience at the peril of his eternal soul.
But if it's true that you get to just pick and choose which of these beliefs to hold onto, then you lose everything. A canon of independent holy writ and doctrinal unity are your saving throw. That's how you differentiate beliefs that "come from God" and have that authority from beliefs that are just "what I want to do," which have no more authority than anyone else's. Being a jerk to others on the basis of a "sincerely held religious belief" gets a pass. Being a jerk to others on the basis of, "I don't like those people" shouldn't—and doesn't. So no, your cafeteria approach completely undermines any moral authority you might claim as a believer in God.
Finally, once you've admitted that you can apply logic, reason, and evidence to determine what and how much of your religion to believe, you have zero justification for calling out people who do the same thing and conclude that they don't want to believe in any of it. They're just doing what you do, only more so. You're either all in or a skeptic to some degree.
