RFP for my soul

A couple of months ago, I was talking to a friend of mine and mentioned an analogy I had developed awhile ago regarding a "RFP for my soul". For those of you who haven't spent time in business and/or procurement, a RFP is a "request for proposal" and large organizations use them to solicit bids and proposals from multiple vendors when they are sourcing products and services. For example, my father works for a company that helps the government source billions of dollars of telecommunications services through this mechanism. In my case, I asked the question "what if I issued an RFP for my soul?" After all, my soul is worth billions of dollars too (at least to me). So why not go through a similar procurement process for an organized religion?

Now, for those of you who have had the pleasure of writing RFPs or responding to RFPs as I have, you know that they are typically these enormous documents that cover a lot of ground. Also, sometimes, rather than answer a question directly, the response is "see the attached whitepaper" or something like that. In the context of religion, I could envision a process where I drafted a set of questions like "does God exist?" or "what is the nature of God?" and all of the responses I would get would be "see the enclosed book(s)". Then I'd have to pour through the Bible or Qur'an or Gita or Book of Mormon to find the answers to my questions and enter into a contractual relationship with whatever vendor seemed to have the best product and most fit my set of requirements. The obvious issue here is that it would take a very long time to do an exhaustive examination of all of these books and all of these religions. I could devote my whole life to the task and potentially reach no definitive conclusions or reach a perfect truth of God.

In response to this, my friend reminded me that RFPs are very rarely won or loss on objective merit or examination of the RFP responses. Obviously the product or service has to meet some minimum set of requirements but, beyond that, salesmanship tends to predominate (for better or worse). So my friend suggested that I recruit good salesmen for each religion and approach it that way. C.S. Lewis is one good salesman for Christianity. Huston Smith is another who I have referenced in the past in the context of the world's religions.

Would be interested in others' opinions on this topic. How do you know when to pick a religion and just go with it? Or when does it make sense to do the exhaustive, RFP-like evaluation before making the selection? My opinion is that you just know when something is right for you even if you haven't done an exhaustive search of all the possibilities. For example, my wife and I met at the beginning of my freshman year of college and she was my first serious girlfriend. Even though I didn't do an exhaustive search of every possible spouse, I have no doubt in my mind that she's the one for me. I just know. So I would suspect you reach a similar point with religion even if you haven't investigated all the other options to a similar degree.