Agnostics

[bennyboy]

Congratulations.  You found a common thread linking all these ancillary descriptions together.  And I'll bet you didn't have to do any research; you just spun them out of the general meaning of the word 'god' as delivered up by your subconscious.  Your very protest simply underscores my point.  You didn't have to do any work linking these together because they were already linked in your mind.  You may not be able to clearly elucidate the common elements that brought this list together, but that's not the same thing as not having a meaning in mind.

Yep. A bag of puppies is not God. Fair enough.

 How would we here define God, you and me?

I'm not a fan of private languages.  Instead, why don't you go to a university philosophy department and try to persuade the professors that because there are differing definitions for philosophy that you don't know whether you believe philosophy does or doesn't exist.  You see, pointing out divergent ancillary usages of a word does nothing to undermine the point that there is a common, often unspoken, core to the meaning of a word.  We can argue about how cat, or chair, or milk, might be defined by an obstructionist, but these words have a common usage which underscores their usefulness as words.  Just as philosophy and god may not have exacting definitions, they both have a common core which is, albeit sometimes vaguely, understood by your average English speaker.  Your arguing that the word can have different subsidiary meanings does not eliminate the point that they have common meanings as well.

Again, fair enough. So why don't we verbalize them on our own? I'm not a big fan of linking wiki pages and quoting profs, when those people don't have any better view on it than I do.