Before I even get started: No offense intended to anyone who subscribes to "organized religion," okay? These are just my own personal views/opinions.
Firstly, I don't believe that religion was ever supposed to be "organized" or "secularized" or what have you... that happened when politics started interfering with faith. So, IMO, organized religion (and, therefore, bashing others who don't believe exactly the same way that you do) is a crock of you-know-what. One truth, many paths, I say. Faith isn't dependant on what sect you belong to, or which version of the Bible, Koran, Torah, etc, you happen to read... it's just what it says it is... FAITH (in anything that makes your life worth living...whether it's God, Kali, Buddha, Tony the Tiger, etc...)
Now, as far as how I "believe"... I'm pretty much convinced (like Lyskhala and a number of others) that we're all part of a Universal consciousness... Who we truly are (our souls or spirits) has nothing to do with the bodies we inhabit and, when it comes right down to it, we are those "beings of pure energy" that a lot of folks one day hope to become. We just happen to be smaller bits of a bigger whole, sent out to experience life and find our way through it for as long as these bodies last. When our physical forms die, the essence of who we are and what we learned while we inhabited these shells, leaves the flesh behind and returns to join back up with that universal consciousness long enough to "share our experiences" and add them to the Cosmic Knowledge Base (for lack of a better term at the moment)... Now, once those experiences are "downloaded", that little bit of energy that was once you or me or her or he may just get sent out into the universe again to inhabit another body and learn/experience even more (perhaps from a completely different perspective... maybe we do come back as cows in India, for example... maybe that old dude over there was once a Lakota squaw back in the early 1800s... maybe that lady over there first walked the earth as Joseph (step father to Jesus)....
I could go on and on and on and on (as Lysk can probably tell you... I'm pretty sure she's been subjected to my thoughts on the universe more than once) but, I'll save your eyeballs and your noodles the pain.