'God' is starting to make less sense to me. (rant)

[Pyrrho]

Regarding the term "God" not making any sense, take a look at:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ignosticism

Also, this has been discussed before:

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It would be nice if any evidence/argument for believing in gods could be preceded by an adequate god definition.

It would be nice if people were reasonable, but that, too, is just a fantasy.  You are not likely to get more than gibberish for a "god" definition, and if you do, you will find them retreating from it, erasing it into nothingness.  This idea has been discussed by Antony Flew:

Let us begin with a parable. It is a parable developed from a tale told by John Wisdom in his haunting and revolutionary article "Gods." Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, "Some gardener must tend this plot." The other disagrees, "There is no gardener." So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. "But perhaps he is an invisible gardener." So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. (For they remember how H. G. Well's The Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. "But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible, to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves." At last the Sceptic despairs, "But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?"

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http://www.svsu.edu/~koperski/flew.htm

Now a couple of minor points:

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God is a personal god, but yet billions believe in this "personal" god as one god? Is it just me, or does that really sound like the opposite of "personal?"

I believe they typically mean that they have a personal relationship with God.  And God is supposedly capable of keeping track of everyone, so that isn't a problem.

That you have a personal relationship with another person does not prevent that other person from having a personal relationship with other people.  The same idea applies to god.

If god is all knowing, he has no free will because he knows what he is going to do in a million years, so he's not all powerful because anything he does in the future is limited by time. For example, if he knows he is going to move a mountain at 6pm tomorrow night, then that's what he's destined to do, and he can't change that. So, if he is all powerful, then he can't know what he's going to do tomorrow at 6pm and thus he isn't all knowing.

Think about it in more ordinary terms.  Suppose you decide today that you are going to open a bottle of beer tomorrow after you get home from work.  And suppose that after you get home from work tomorrow, you open a bottle of beer.  You are not going to tell us that you could not have done otherwise, if you had wished to do otherwise, are you?  It is not "destiny" or forced for you to decide to do something in advance and then do it.  It is that at the time you do it, you still want to do it.  Otherwise, you would not do it.  The same idea applies to god.

(Free will is often problematic for other reasons, and I would recommend waiting for your opponent to bring up the subject, and then have them define it and see what can be done with it.  Otherwise, you are possibly going to be faced with the question of what, exactly, is "free will."  You probably don't want to be in that situation.  For more on that, read this.)

It's similar to the 'rock he can't move' argument. Can god create a rock he cannot move? Yes, then he's not all powerful because he can't move the rock. No, then he's not all powerful because he is incapable of making the rock that he can't move.

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Although I have encountered idiots who believe contradictory nonsense, the standard approach to "all powerful" is to say that it means able to do anything that can be done; anything that is not self-contradictory or logically impossible.  One cannot make a round square, either, but that is not what is generally meant by "all powerful."  You don't want to be accused of arguing against a straw man, do you?


None of this is to suggest that the god belief is sensible or anything like that.  But you should be careful about presenting a bad argument, or your opponent will latch on to that to get you away from things that are better.