It isn't the atheist's job to define God. All we do is examine the multitude of definitions for God which are put forth by theists and point out whatever we discover in them which seems to be illogical, immoral, or just plain nonsensical. Speaking for myself, I don't think the god or no-god argument amounts to a damn thing except how it shapes a person's political ideas. I'm a weak atheist, since to be completely honest I don't believe that there is no god. I think it's probable that there is no god, but I don't believe it. I have no faith whatsoever in the proposition: there is no god. I say this for the rising tide of theists who have lost faith in faith and seem dead set on turning what was for centuries a cardinal virtue into a condition of mental depravity and happily attributing it to atheists. But while I'm a weak atheist, I'm a strong secularist.
There are literally thousands of definitions of God up for offer. Even among Christians there are thousands of definitions of God, and hundreds of thousands of sub-definitions. Since God remains unavailable for any sort of analysis, the definition of God remains highly personal and subjective. For this reason it's laughably incorrect to suggest that the Bible is an objective, authoritative basis for any sort of political ideology. How could it be when people who make this very claim have been at each other's throats for more than two thousand years? The Bible, purportedly the word of God, has been a miserable failure as a source of moral and peaceful co-existence among human beings. I'll concede that no political system is without fault, and that certain non-theistic approaches to the problem of creating civil societies have failed just as miserably, but what I can't understand is how so many people feel that the problems with the world today are the result of a falling away from God's law, or God's commandments, or what have you, when two thousand years of bloody conflicts, witch-hunts, inquisitions, crusades, and holy wars have never brought about a time of peace, have never brought about a happier society, have never done a thing to improve the human condition?
Has any definition of God been sufficient to produce any positive effect in the world? Of course not. In fact, quite the contrary: the inability of theists themselves to arrive at a plausible and universal definition of God has had nothing but negative effects. The fact is, humans are prone to disagreement and discord is inevitable, and history has demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt that no definition of God, no religious doctrine whatsoever, has altered this fact.
And yet many Americans, - to speak of my own particular tribe - completely ignorant of how their country was founded, and a good deal of them equally ignorant of the Bible, believe that America is an example of God's law in action, and the only example. Many Americans believe that America was founded on a Judeo-Christian worldview, or "values", without realizing that there is no such thing as "a" Judeo-Christian worldview, or that one Christian's "values" might be diametrically opposed to another Christian's. They blissfully forget that certain Christian "values" once caused other Christians to be imprisoned, tortured, even burned alive, or that the Book that these so-called "values" were founded upon is the very same Book which they believe gave birth to ideas of political freedom and human rights.
If you're a theist and don't feel that religion and politics should mix, then I don't care in the least about what you believe. You can believe whatever you like and I hope you have a happy life, sincerely; but if you're a theist and you believe that your definition of God is the correct one and that it should be the basis for public policy, well now I'm deeply interested in you. If we're talking metaphysics or epistemology, I can be civil and friendly, but if we're talking ethics and politics, and if your ultimate intention is to deprive me of my rights as a human being - which means my right to have, or not have, whatever religious feelings I damn well please, well now we have a problem.
It's one thing for people to put their heads together and come up with laws that intend to make society more secure, and it's no surprise that people, who are by no means perfect, should create imperfect forms of government; but it's quite another thing for people to claim that they have been given the means of forming a better society by a supernatural being with whom no one has had any kind of direct contact, a being who has been defined in thousands of ways, a being who is eternal and changeless but whose followers have changed dramatically over a relatively brief stretch of time, a being who openly declares favoritism to a particular group of people, a being who is described as perfect in every sense but who cannot exist without the constant praise and the endless humility of entities of far lesser magnitude, entities who are so corrupt that this perfect being cannot accept a single one of them to his breast without forgiving them for their imperfections, a being of incomprehensible magnitude who enjoys the smell of roasted animal flesh, a being of absolute knowledge and intelligence who doesn't know that some women do not have an issue of blood when they lose their virginity, a being who promises to spread excrement on the faces of certain people who displease him, a being who decides to put his word in a certain book which is intended to act as a beacon to humanity and which is nonetheless interpreted a million different ways by the very people who trust in it completely and which either directly or indirectly causes conflict and war and widespread human suffering. If theists expect to influence government policy I suggest that they do the one thing they haven't been able to do: come up with something that works better than what we've tried so far. But remember, we folks with our eyes open already know that a return to God's law, if by that you mean Old Testament law, would spell certain disaster today just as it spelled disaster in times past. And by disaster I mean witch-hunts, inquisitions, crusades, holy wars, dark ages. If theists couldn't agree on crucial doctrinal issues at any time in the past sufficiently enough to keep from cutting one another's throats and burning one another at the stake, what reason do we have to think they'd be able to do it now?
And just to add, in fairness: I'm a secularist much more than I'm an atheist. A theist can be a secularist, in fact many theists are secularists. I am just as opposed to depriving people of their right to worship God as I am to making god-belief a civic duty. The attempt to stamp out religion by force is just as misguided and stupid as trying to establish a theocracy by force.
If God Himself or Herself comes and tells me to shut up, I'll shut up. But not until then.
