So then what is the nature of this concept of god we're loosely talking about? There are multitudes of interpretations: perhaps as many interpretations as there are individuals, which itself undergoes collectively a refining process as the ideas are worked out in an intellectual and priestly class, but which eventually become socially fixed into a dominant discourse, which does complicate our conception without negating it.
Take for example the culling out of heretics and the hammering out of official Christian church homogeneity, which is eventually codified into law while the concentrated church remained fused with the state. One example I can think of is the treatment of an intellectual like Spinoza who would eventually come along to honestly carry out explorations of the logical endpoint of an omnipresent and omniscient singular conception of "god," by locating that god in everything that exists, thereby disintegrating the basis for a localized emanation of that god, which would thus remove an important rationale for fencing off and controlling that localized emanation. For that he was denounced as a dangerous heretic and atheist by authorities and ostracized as a result. And there were plenty of other examples of that sort of occurrence throughout history.
So a god is not just an objective, collectively shared image and belief - though the collectively determined form and its nature does matter to the expression and function of a given worshipping society - but also the ongoing relation of all interpretations and transformations taking place in that greater movement, forming a greater personality, which is constantly undergoing change and a feedback with its cosmos.
That personality is far stranger and dynamic than what any sort of mainstream cosmological vision can describe. The body politic that forms around a given god image is set against itself: where there is dogma there are heretics, who must be culled out as conventional doctrine is hammered out. Nevertheless the totality of this process does have a certain personality, a certain character: you can see it in the institutions, the class striations and class conflict, crime and punishment, mass culture, art and architecture, revolution and war, and the like.
And the very consciousness that participates in such a personality forms the basis of that personality as well: there are laid back nature gods, wrathful gods of vengeance, jealous gods of catastrophe, ecstatic gods of pleasure, penetrating gods of discrimination and judgment, berserker gods of war, and god-denying rationalists, each with their share of luminous mystics and control freak dogmatists and everything in between, the cumulative effects of which determine an overall participatory consciousness in general. The belief - or disbelief - in a given unifying and organizing god concept, and how to relate to that concept (or entity) as an individual alters the nature of the participation, and what is experienced, and what ultimately manifests as a result.
This was somewhat of a dense treatment, so I'll let that sit and soon move on to elaborate on a general conception of god forms, sprinkling in some self-criticism and thoughts about modernity and future direction, for good measure.
